Seismometers buried in the Ross Ice Shelf have revealed that its snowy surface constantly vibrates, producing a low rumble of noise that scientists can use to monitor changes

The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest expanse of floating ice on the planet (similar to the size of France). Because of this, it acts as a buttress, holding back the Antarctic glaciers, preventing them from flowing into the ocean. If destabilised – either by the warming ocean below or the warming atmosphere above – this vital role could be diminished, resulting in a rapid rise in sea levels.

Monitoring the ice shelf is therefore essential and scientists from the American Geophysical Union, suported by the Office of Polar Programs for the US National Science Foundation, have discovered a new tool with which to do so. In 2014, the team buried 34 super-sensitive seismic sensors beneath the ice shelf’s surface, a terrain made up of a thick blanket of snow several metres deep and rippled by massive dunes. The instruments measured seismic signals – the waves of energy produced by movement within the earth. The data revealed that winds whipping across the snow dunes cause the ice shelf’s surface to vibrate. This steady vibration results in the emission of seismic ‘tones’. When processed at a frequency audible to humans, these tones sound like an eerie, warbling hum, a continuous song that would not sound out of place in a sci-fi movie.

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Rick Aster, professor of geophysics at Colorado State University and a member of the team, explains that the tones provide an extremely accurate way of monitoring the ice. This is because when weather conditions change, the pitch of the hum responds. ‘A remarkable thing we discovered during this study was that even during a relatively subtle warming event that only produced a tiny bit of melt on the ice shelf, we could see very strong indications in this signal,’ he says. ‘It enables us to monitor the temperature and the melting of the surface of an ice shelf on a minute-by-minute basis.’

Rick Aster in the Antarctica with a broadband seismometer. The sensors were buried a few meters into the snow to take measurements

The team are now considering burying the sensors deeper under the ice to monitor vibration at various depths. ‘The first thing to do is to understand the processes and the changes that are happening,’ says Aster. ‘Over 90 per cent of the world’s ice is in Antarctica. As it melts it contributes a greater and greater proportion to rising sea levels and that’s felt all around the world.’

This was published in the January 2019 edition of Geographical magazine

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A tightening of restrictions on the insecticides known as neonicotinoids has brought hope that the decline in honey bees and wild pollinators can be reversed. Yet concerns are growing as to how new technology could radically change the landscape. Are we heading towards a world of ‘frankenbees’, in which gene-edited…

When is a ban not a ban? When, it seems, it applies to neonicotinoids. Amid much fanfare, the European Union last year expanded the restriction of three pesticides – clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam, all of which act as nerve agents – to all field crops. The decision was taken in the face of growing evidence that the pesticides can harm domesticated honey bees as well as wild pollinators. This reinforced a moratorium dating back to 2013, which forbade their use in flowering crops that appeal to honey bees and other pollinating insects. Thiamethoxam has been shown in laboratory studies to dramatically reduce egg laying by queen bumblebees and all three neonicotinoids affect bees’ memory. By the end of 2018, thiamethoxam’s use in Europe was limited to indoor greenhouses.

This strengthening of the law was necessary because the 2013 ban did not confine the pesticides to history. The prohibition only applied to certain crops, such as oil seed rape and sugar beet. Continued use on some cereals was permitted and actually increased in the UK after the ban, according to the government’s own open-source website (geog.gr/peststats).

The UK was not the only EU country in which neonicotinoid use continued. In Romania, farmers successfully lobbied against the ban on the grounds that they were suffering economic losses. ‘Bee keepers there are absolutely desperate about the state of losses,’ says Professor Noa Simon, scientific and technical advisor for both BeeLife (an association of European beekeepers) and CARI (the Belgian apiculture research institute). ‘It’s incredible that 20 years after concerns were first raised about neonicotinoids, these pesticides are still with us.’

Beyond European shores their use is even more striking. The three neonicotinoids in question remain the world’s most widely used pesticides. ‘The EU has the best regulation but it’s not perfect and outside the EU it is pretty much open season, with the exception of [the Canadian state of] Ontario,’ says Professor Dave Goulson, of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex. In August 2018, the current US administration overturned a ban on neonicotinoids brought in under Barack Obama.

Honey bee shortagesAccording to a study covering 41 European countries the overall number of honey bee stocks has increased by seven per cent between 2005 and 2010 (to an estimated 13.4 million colonies with seven billion honey bees). Unfortunately, 15 countries have also experienced declines, ranging from four per cent in Slovenia to 47 per cent in Switzerland. At the same time, more biofuel crops (oilseed rape, sunflower and soybean) means increased demand for pollination. This map series demonstrates the link between density of honey bees and the number of colonies required to provide pollination services. The supply of honey bees relative to the national demand varies considerably between European countries. Of all countries included in the survey, the United Kingdom’s shortage of honey bees is only surpassed by Moldova.

INSECT ARMAGEDDON

The use of neonicotinoids as well as other pesticides, insecticides and herbicides has been closely associated with a decline in pollinators. Honey bee numbers in the US and UK have dropped by around 50 per cent in the last 25 years. More than half of UK rivers are more polluted than they should be and that, says Matt Shardlow, chief executive of conservation charity, Buglife, is down to neonicotinoids. Last summer, a vision of an insect armageddon emerged after a study of nature reserves across Germany found that the abundance of flying insects had plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years. The scientists ruled out weather change in the reserves as a cause. While data on pesticide levels had not been collected, it was widely concluded that pesticides and destruction of wild areas were likely to be the main causes.

‘The drop of 76 per cent in 25 years was pretty terrifying,’ says Goulson, who was involved in the study. ‘The most plausible theory to explain it is the way in which the environment has changed. Nature reserves are now islands surrounded by the fairly hostile terrain of intensive agriculture. Our best guess is that if bees and other insects wander out of those reserves they are unlikely to survive the experience.’

Even with the partial ban on neonicotinoids, other pesticides and insecticides are still widely deployed. Across the EU, more than 500 pesticides are approved for use and regulation appears haphazard. ‘Even fungicides haven’t been well studied,’ says Goulson. ‘There’s a suggestion that fungicides may be even more harmful to bees than neonicotinoids. It’s not a huge leap to say they are playing a significant role in the decline of insects. Ultimately it’s a combination of this blizzard of pesticides and changes in habitat.’

The stakes are extraordinarily high. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 90 per cent of the world’s food supply comes from about 100 crop species, and 71 of those crops (especially fruits and vegetables) rely on bees for pollination. Around 270 species of wild bee do the bulk of this work.

Integrated Pest ManagmentThe concept of integrated pest management (IPM) is the default position of both the European Commission and the FAO. In essence, it asserts that, when it comes to pest control, pesticides are the tool of last resort and that natural pest control mechanisms should be deployed first. ‘The initial approach is to have healthy crop rotation,’ says Professor Noa Simon of BeeLife. ‘The problem is that crops are rotated too quickly: cereal year one, cereal year two, sugar beet year three. But you need to keep the same crop for five to seven years to help pollinators.’

Both Simon and Hans Dreyer at the FAO think IPM should be the cornerstone of crop protection and that farmers should ensure they are sowing the appropriate crop. ‘If you are sowing oil seed rape in Sweden it makes sense to sow the local variety rather than one from southern Spain,’ says Simon. ‘The local one has had generations to build up resistance to local pests and their phenotype will be more robust and less susceptible.’

Farmers can also employ a ‘push and pull’ system, in which crops are grown near plants that naturally push away pests and pull in their enemies. For example, a maize field vulnerable to stem borer moths could be surrounded by a border of napier grass, a plant that is more attractive to the moths than maize (the ‘pull’ part of the system). The forage legume silverleaf could then be planted within the maize. This plant releases semiochemicals that repel the moths (the ‘push’ element). If this doesn’t work, then you take advantage of natural predators, such as birds and hoverflies. Biotechnical options, such as caging the queen bee so that parasites cannot reproduce, can also be applied. ‘Only then should you look at pesticides – first the “soft” ones, then the “hard” ones,’ says BeeLife’s Simon. ‘Options include garlic-based sprays, essential oils and organic acids. As a last resort, when nothing else works, you turn to synthetic pesticides. But we don’t often see this sequential approach followed.’

PESTICIDE GOVERNANCE

Concerns about neonicotinoids were first raised in 1996, a year after they were introduced, by French beekeepers who reported that their bees had begun to die. ‘We know even tiny amounts of neonicotinoids have a lethal effect – just one part per billion in nectar can impair bees’ ability to navigate and egg laying by queens,’ says Goulson. ‘It has also emerged that neonicotinoids are much more persistent and get deep into soils, contaminating streams and hedgerows.’

The impacts of neonicotinoids do not dissipate slowly. ‘They are persistent products so it will take perhaps 80 years for the environment to become cleaner,’ says Professor Simon. She points to the impact of the herbicide Atrozine, which was banned in the EU in 2003, but residue of which is still found in soils, water and foodstuffs.

On a more positive note, Goulson reports that there is ‘clear evidence’ that the concentration of neonicotinoids in bee food is lower since the ban. Anecdotally, news from beekeepers is also encouraging: according to BeeLife, they are seeing fewer dead honey bees and more are surviving winter. ‘It is too early to say whether the ban has had an impact on invertebrate life,’ says Goulson. ‘It takes time for things to respond to change, even if it can. That’s the problem with damaging biodiversity – there’s no guarantee that when you finally take away the chemicals the bees will return. It may be several years or a decade before we know if the bees, the moths, the wasps or the beetles can recover.’

Given the concerns about the impact of pesticides, you might expect their use to be strictly governed, perhaps by a global convention. The reality, points out Buglife’s Shardlow, ‘is that 35 per cent of the world has no pesticide legislation. The manufacturers can continue to sell their wares around the world and make a lot of money and will continue to do so until the last drop of neonicotinoid has been sold. I think that is immoral.’

Pesticide useThis cartogram shows the average use of pesticides per area of cropland. The transformation is based on a gridded cartogram technique in which each grid square over land is proportional to the total area used for crops. The colour key shows the annual agricultural use of pesticides divided by the area of cropland in each country. Pesticides include fungicides and bactericides, herbicides, insecticides, plant growth regulators, seed treatment fungicides, seed treatment insecticides, mineral oils, rodenticides, and disinfectants. Data was compiled by the FAO.

The Rotterdam Convention governs certain hazardous chemicals and pesticides but mainly relates to international trade, is not legally binding and leaves it up to signatory nations to decide whether or not to use the chemicals. Elsewhere, pesticide use is overseen by regional jurisdictions – where they exist.

In 2013 the FAO produced an international code of conduct for pesticide management, from testing to use and monitoring, which was aimed at government authorities and the pesticide industry. The code places an emphasis on avoiding pesticide use if possible, arguing that ‘providing farmers with access to local supplies of well adapted and good quality seeds… helps to prevent the spread of pests and diseases… and reduce reliance on pesticides’.

However, as Hans Dreyer, a senior director in the FAO’s Plant Production and Protection Division (AGP), acknowledges: ‘Our code of conduct is well referenced but it is voluntary. We support countries in trying to refrain from using really hazardous pesticides and help them to impose proper regulations. But many countries do not have the elaborate risk procedures that are found in the EU, their institutions are not as strong.’

Professor Simon points out that seed treatments for some crops have been banned in countries such as France, Germany and Belgium but not elsewhere. She wonders whether this means pesticides are expected to recognise international boundaries. ‘The basic precautionary principles that should be in place with pesticides are not always applied,’ she says. ‘We know pesticides are always going to come onto the market. What is important is that we have a strong risk assessment regime that looks at risks in the short and long term. If we don’t put the systems in place we will never know if we are safe or not. At the moment, the issue is dealt with the wrong way around. We wait until a crisis is seen in bees and then the pesticides are reviewed. This should be established in advance.’

Goulson too is unhappy about how crop controls are regulated. ‘The regulatory authorities in North America are more gung-ho than Europe,’ he says. ‘They have looked at exactly the same evidence and drawn different conclusions. [Atrozine, banned in the EU, continues to be among the most widely used herbicides in the US.] There’s been a recurring pattern for 70 years. A pesticide is introduced, we’re told it’s benign to people and the environment. Eventually it transpires, usually after decades, that this is far from the truth. It gets banned, is replaced by something else and the process repeats itself. The regulatory process has let us down.’

‘Pesticides need to be tested regularly, which is easier said than done,’ acknowledges Dreyer. ‘Pesticides have developed significantly since the 1950s. While the volume of pesticide has reduced, their toxicity has increased – so you can get the same risks.’

The next generation of pesticidesAs well as trying to overturn the neonicotinoid ban, some agrochemical companies are developing alternatives. The concern is that these pesticides are not only in development but are already being used or are moving through the regulatory processes. They include sulfoxaflor, cyantraniliprole and flupyradifurone.Some of these pesticides are used as foliar sprays, others are coated onto seeds to protect them from soil pests – when the seed germinates, the pesticide is absorbed and spreads through the tissue. It eventually reaches pollen and nectar, which is how pollinators are exposed.

The companies producing sulfoxaflor (Dow Agrochemicals) and flupyradifurone (Bayer CropScience) have published scientific articles asserting that these substances are not neonicotinoids. However, a study published in the journal Nature in 2018 concluded that ‘chronic exposure to the sulfoximine-based insecticide sulfoxaflor, at dosages consistent with potential post-spray field exposure, has severe sub-lethal effects on bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) colonies.’Sulfoxaflor is registered in 47 countries but its registration in France was overturned in 2017. Cyantraniliprole has been authorised for use in the US, Canada, China and India. Flupyradifurone is a systemic insecticide aimed, says its manufacturer Bayer, at the target markets of the US, Europe, India and China. Some of these pesticides are neurotoxins that target the same receptors in insect brains as the neonicotinoids. ‘Many of them sound and look like neonicotinoids,’ says Goulson.

INDUSTRY BUZZ

Conservationists also feel the dice are loaded against them and that a deep-seated prejudice prevails in regulatory authorities. ‘For many years, bee keepers have been portrayed as the trouble makers,’ says Simon, ‘but they are just conveying the message. They are able to monitor what is happening. They are permanently in the field.’

‘There’s a bubble in which the industry can maintain their belief about certain chemicals and their effectiveness,’ adds Shardlow. ‘The saying goes that history is written by the victors but in this case the wealth and power of the losing side means they are writing their alternative history. It’s the same approach that was taken over DDT. When it was banned, they said Rachel Carson was personally responsible for thousands of malaria deaths. It was absolute nonsense.’ Shardlow is referring to the author of Silent Spring, the book that led to the ban of the insecticide DDT, one use of which was to kill malarial mosquitoes. As part of the chemical industry push back, claims were made that the ban led to a rise in malaria and the deaths of millions of people. Shardlow says that the industry is taking the same approach now: rather than acknowledging the problem caused by pesticides, they are arguing that there will be greater pest problems and lower crop yields if pesticides are banned.

A tractor equipped with a sprayer works its way through a field of crops

A source of frustration among conservationists is the way that the concept of integrated pest management (IPM), which asserts that pesticides be used as a last resort, appears to have slipped off the radar. ‘In the EU all farmers were supposed to implement the concept and use alternatives to pesticides but it just hasn’t happened,’ says Goulson.

On the other hand, Dr Chris Hartfield, senior regulatory affairs officer for the UK’s National Farmers’ Union (NFU), argues that this portrayal of farmers is unfair. ‘It’s disingenuous to say we are locked into a mentality of “pesticides first”,’ he responds. ‘Pesticides are a costly input and farmers ensure there is good justification to use them.’

Hartfield also maintains that criticism of farmers’ attitude towards IPM is unfounded. ‘We recognise this should be at the heart of what farmers do,’ he says. ‘We have more than 20,000 UK farmers with a collective four million hectares currently recording their approaches [using IPM]. The reality is they already rotate their crops and implement other measures that are part of integrated pest management without necessarily knowing that is what it is called.’

It hardly needs pointing out that the farming industry’s response to the ban on neonicotinoids has been broadly hostile. Sugar beet farmers have argued – with justification – that there is no alternative to neonicotinoids, while the sector more widely has said farmers will simply turn to more harmful pesticides that are not banned. Hartfield agrees that a precautionary approach should be applied but argues that ‘unintended consequences’ have occurred because the ban was disproportionate. ‘Farmers have simply turned to the next pesticide along the line, which can mean pyrethroids, older chemicals and sprays. If you ban something you need to have confidence that what replaces it is less damaging.’

Paradoxically, more pesticide-treated crops than ever may now be in circulation. ‘Yields of oil seed rape have gone down in the EU, but the demand for foods that contains it remains the same,’ says Hartfield. ‘To meet that demand, oil seed rape is being imported from outside the EU with a strong likelihood that it contains neonicotinoids.’

Neither are pesticide manufacturers taking the restrictions lying down. German pharmaceutical company, Bayer, is involved in a protracted dispute with the General Court of the European Union over its neonicotinoid, imidacloprid. In May last year, the court ruled that the precautionary principle employed by the EU meant that it did not have to wait until it was clear that harm had been caused before taking measures such as bans or restrictions.

Bayer has since appealed against this ruling, arguing that the interpretation of the principle and EU law are not legally founded and that the decision-making process was flawed and should be reconsidered. Bayer says its stands by the safety of its products.

Commuter beesAcross large parts of the United States, colonies of bees are transported long distances in purpose-built trailers to pollinate inter-state crops and fruit trees. Up to 30 billion bees are transported from other states to pollinate the almond crops in California. Many colonies are repeatedly moved over several months to a series of large monocultures. The phenomenon has been associated with poor bee health (including the spread of the varroa mite), weakened bee immune systems and colony collapse disorder, whereby the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear, leaving a queen bee behind.

ROBOT SWARMS

Technological advances are likely to shift the parameters of the debate. Depending on your perspective, the potential opportunities offered by robotics and genetic engineering will either be reassuring or deeply disturbing.

At least five companies are working to develop robot bees that could be controlled in swarms to pollinate crops and be impervious to insecticides. Last year scientists at Delft University of Technology developed a prototype bee-like drone, whose wings beat 17 times per second to generate the lift needed to stay airborne. The robotic insect has a 33cm wingspan and weighs 29 grams, making it 55 times the size of a fruit fly. Harvard is also looking at such developments. ‘If we’re not careful we could end up with a situation where we have an environmental market for something we get for free,’ says Matt Shardlow of Buglife. ‘It could be in some companies’ financial interests to keep that going.’

Other researchers are studying whether it is possible to genetically engineer bees to be resistant to pesticides. By using CRISPR technology – a molecular tool that can amend an organism’s genetic code – it is possible to insert a desired trait into the specimen in question, such as a honey bee. Inevitably, bee keepers have labelled these ‘frankenbees’. The first genetically modified honey bee queens were born in a laboratory at Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf in 2014.

The DelFly Nimble, a robot designed at Delft University of Technology to mimic the flight of bees

‘Do we want to take honey bees into such a dark place?’ asks Shardlow. ‘It would mean that the countryside becomes a living hell for any pollinator that isn’t a honey bee. They will be sprayed to death. It just moves us closer to the collapse of the natural eco-system. Perhaps people forget that honey bees do not pollinate every flower. Our wild plants will disappear and we end up with a world where only the rich can afford pollinated food. A world where pollination is only available to those who can afford it, where many people have no access to fruit, is truly terrifying and will lead to massive societal pressures. It begins to look like something out of Blade Runner. We lose the beauty and wonder and we expose ourselves and other animals to risks needlessly.’

The prospect also horrifies Goulson, who forecasts that it would instantly remove the incentive for farmers to reduce pesticide use. ‘It would mean the end of the wild world and all the beauty that is inherent in it.’

Dreyer of the FAO is also cool on the concept of genetic engineering. ‘It depends how you modify the bee,’ he says. ‘What kind of pesticide-resistant trait would you modify and in what gene? And what happens when the bee detoxifies the chemical – what does that mean for the bee? And how could honey produced by that bee have no pesticide residue in it?’ Given honey is one of those elemental products that consumers broadly consider to be pure, Dreyer struggles to see the commercial viability of such processes. ‘We are not actively pushing this,’ he adds. ‘It’s up to individual countries to decide whether to pursue it. Rather than GM bees, we would prefer to see a sustainable landscape where bees can survive.’

Farming unions play down such spectres. ‘I don’t believe we are going to see robot bees any time soon,’ says the NFU’s Hartfield. ‘We are going to be reliant on real insects. That said, we need to encourage innovation to overcome the challenges we face. Unfortunately, the extremely precautionary and conservative pesticide regulations we face are stifling that.’

However, Dreyer and the FAO do see some potential good arising from advances in technology. ‘Pest control will become more knowledge intensive,’ says Dreyer. The FAO sees plenty of potential positive uses, some of which are already in operation. ‘Robots are at a very early stage,’ says Dreyer. ‘But if they are able to distinguish a weed from a crop, then they may be part of a future where herbicides are used less on crops such as cotton.’ The potential for biopesticides that deploy natural pheromones to deter pests may also have potential, he says, but ‘while a lot of research is being done, it is too risky at the moment to be used in large-scale trials’.

The potential benefits of so-called ‘precision agriculture’ are recognised across the spectrum. ‘This may mean you can apply pesticides exactly where they are needed and could be a step in the right direction,’ says Goulson. ‘But it is simplistic to think we can solve everything through technology.’

Vital statisticsThe absence of bees and other pollinators would wipe out coffee, apples, almonds, tomatoes, strawberries, pepper, onions and cocoa, to name just a few of the crops that rely on pollination. In addition, almost 90 per cent of wild flowering plants depend to some extent on animal pollination. A single honey bee will typically visit around 7,000 flowers a day, and it takes four million flower visits to produce a kilogram of honey. Annual honey production from the western honey bee is 1.6 million tonnes.

CHEMICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The fear for conservationists is that many politicians and leaders will not listen to such warnings. Or, if they do, will simply say ‘so what? I don’t care’ and feel that their hardcore base of support will unquestioningly support them. Yet Shardlow is optimistic. ‘There are plenty of people out there who get the importance of this. The public understands it, their mood on pesticides has changed enormously. Politicians may not always be dynamic but we know that many understand the seriousness of this. We have perhaps 20 to 40 years to turn it around, so it’s not over yet.’

At least all sides of the debate agree that the public needs to think harder about the implications of their shopping habits. ‘This isn’t about what farmers do, it’s about where food production sits,’ says Hartfield. ‘Pesticides are a fundamental part of our current food production system. All of us, farmers, retailers and shoppers have bought into this system because it gives us safe, affordable and regular supplies of food.’ If we want our food to be produced in a different way, Hartfield argues, then we all need to buy into the fact that this could come at a greater cost of production.

Ultimately, dealing with the issues surrounding pesticides will involve taking on other pressing concerns. A warming climate, for example, means more pests. ‘We would prefer the problem to be simple,’ says Shardlow. ‘Unfortunately, pollinators aren’t going to conform to that. Insecticides make them vulnerable to disease. Landscape changes make them go locally extinct. Climate change adds more pressure. Car fumes make bees less able to detect honey. We have to bear down on all of these.’

This invites the question of whether a world without pesticides is even possible. ‘I feel sometimes as though I am a lone outrider but I firmly believe we can grow what we need without them,’ says Goulson. ‘Organic yields are 10 to 15 per cent lower than intensive farming yields but we waste more than a third of the food we produce and a high proportion of it is grown for animals. If we cut back on red meat and waste we have more than enough land to feed everyone with organic food.’

Such a rethink is not radical, says Professor Simon. ‘Agriculture has been around for thousands of years and people have still survived and eaten even though they didn’t have the technology we have today,’ she says. ‘Yet we have the attitude of “we have a problem, let’s take a pill to solve it”. There is enough proof and tools for farmers to choose the right way. The problem is they face a lot of pressure from industry not to change.’

The FAO agrees that a different mindset is essential. ‘We need to use technology to solve problems, not create more of them. We need to ask ourselves why we have pests in a particular place, not just say that “we have pests, so let’s use chemicals to solve the problem.” That’s asking the wrong question. The better we understand the systems at play the more options we haves to find alternatives to chemicals.’

Does a political consensus exist? Goulson doubts it. ‘Sadly, I don’t think all that many people care about insects. Some will get upset or notice if they don’t see a particularly colourful butterfly but most people won’t be bothered about moths.

‘The world is currently not sufficiently co-ordinated, nor altruistic,’ he continues. ‘National priorities and interests seem to trump everything. There is no question that we are facing an ecological armageddon, of climate change, pesticide use, massive loss of habitat, soil erosion and plastic pollution. Until we start paying attention to the wider picture, I’m not optimistic that we will help nature recover. But giving up is not an option.’

This was published in the January 2019 edition of Geographical magazine

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Bonnethead sharks, the second smallest member of the hammerhead family, have been shown to not only eat, but digest seagrass, making them the first omnivorous shark known to scientists

It’s a common complaint among shark-lovers – that these majestic creatures are misunderstood, too often associated with the menacing tones of Jaws and deemed brutal man-eaters. A recent shark-related discovery reveals that this impression could be even further from the truth than their fan-base realised.

Samantha Leigh, a researcher at the University of California Irvine has made it her mission to find out more about the nutritional physiology of sharks. When she embarked upon the project she was surprised to find relatively little information available on shark diets. This was until she came across a research paper that analysed the contents of the stomachs of bonnethead sharks, a small shark common in tropical and subtropical waters with a distinctive shovel-like head. The research revealed that in some populations, the material in the sharks’ guts was up to 62 per cent plant material.

Despite these findings, most people thought little of it. The assumption that sharks could only be carnivores, cemented by their blood-thirsty reputation, proved persistent. ‘A lot of people brushed it off and thought they probably just eat plant material and pass it through and nothing is really digested from it,’ says Leigh. ‘But no one had really tested that before.’

To find out more, Leigh uprooted to the Florida Quays, whose waters contain abundant populations of bonnetheads. In the lab, she conducted feeding trials, offering the sharks a diet made up of 90 per cent seagrass and ten per cent squid. ‘We measured out the amount of seagrass we wanted, measured out the amount of squid and then wrapped the seagrass in a really thin sheath of the squid – almost like a little sushi role. They ate it all right up. They all gained weight on this almost totally seagrass diet,’ she says.

Understanding the diet of the bonnethead sharks is important for protecting the seagrass meadows

The fact that the sharks gained weight suggested that they must have the capacity to digest the seagrass. Analysis of their faeces and blood proved that they were indeed extracting and utilising nutrients from the plants, something previously thought impossible. ‘We found that they were digesting a little over half of the organic matter in seagrass, which may not sound like a lot but is pretty on par with sea turtles who eat the same type of grass and are known omnivores and even herbivores as they age.’ These most famous carnivores of the sea turned out to enjoy their greens.

Leigh’s findings have important implications for understanding the ecosystems of the seagrass meadows in which bonnethead sharks live. ‘I’m looking to use the information to find out how to better protect seagrass meadows,’ says Leigh. ‘A lot of them are not doing so well right now, not due to the sharks eating the grass necessarily but due to warming waters, ocean acidification, fishing trawls that damage meadows on the ocean floor and things like that. The more that we understand about how the ecosystem works in these areas, the better we will be equipped to come up with management strategies that will work efficiently.’ How sharks break down food and what they excrete back into the environment is key to this understanding.

Though the varied diet of the bonnethead sharks doesn’t mean that all sharks are practising fleixitarianism (the Great White is unlikely to forgo its carnivorous diet any time soon), Leigh sees no reason why other, smaller sharks might not also be omnivores. ‘There are plenty of other small, coastal sharks that live in very close quarters to, and with ample access to, different types of vegetation,’ she says. ‘This is the first shark that this has been seen in, but I wouldn’t be surprised if years down the road we find that other sharks are capable of this as well.’

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There’s more than enough plastic in the world. That’s why, from now on, our print magazine will be delivered to subscribers in environmentally friendly wrapping

If you’re a subscriber to Geographical, then you may have noticed something a little different about the way the February issue will arrive. Plastic pollution is now one of the most widely accepted man-made issues affecting the health of our planet. There is barely a square metre of the world’s seas that isn’t in some way affected, from floating containers and shopping bags to microbeads finding their way into the food chain via the digestive tracts of sea life.

Which is why I am very pleased to say that as of the February issue, the mailing wrapper that sees each copy of Geographical safely to subscriber doorsteps is now 100 per cent environmentally friendly.

Made from the same potato starch-based biopolymers that are used for food recycling liners, the wrapping is fully home compostable (breaking down by 90 per cent within just six months) or can be placed in either garden or food recycling containers. This is in addition to us having used fully recyclable paper stock for many years now.

A sample issue using the new environmentally-friendly mailing wrapper

Just as restaurants and food outlets are moving to ban plastic straws, and as supermarkets are slowly making the move towards plastic-free packaging on their aisles, so too has the publishing world woken up to the realisation that it’s not enough just to print stories about the need for action, we need to be putting our money where our mouth is.

Certainly we’re not the first title to switch to non-plastic wrapping, but sadly we’re also a long way from being the last. It’s therefore imperative that while we continue to provideunparalleledcoverageof the fightagainst plastic pollution, said stories are delivered in a manner that is palatable both to the mind and to the planet.

The recent discovery of more than 200 million termite mounds in northeastern Brazil, the extent of which had never been understood before, throws up more questions than it answers

Professor Stephen Martin, a social insects expert from the University of Salford was driving along the roads near Lencois, a small Brazilian town popular with backpackers, when he was intrigued by lines of perfectly formed soil mounds at the roadside. At first he suspected construction work but the presence of the mounds within the scrub forest that bordered the road suggested otherwise. ‘Half an hour later I was thinking, gosh there’s a lot of these things,’ says Martin.

Having teamed up with other scientists in the area, he learnt that these regularly spaced mounds, each about 2.5 metres tall and 9 metres across, were termite mounds. Most extraordinary of all was the discovery that they covered an area of 230,000 square kilometres (more than that of Great Britain) and could be viewed on Google Maps. What’s more, initial ageing of the mounds revealed them to be at least 4000 years old.

An aerial view of the mounds (Image: Roy Funch)

For the people living in this sparsely populated region of Brazil the mounds are little more than a nuisance. Impossible to knock down without a bulldozer they have to be worked around. ‘You’ll see people’s houses and they’ll have them in their garden,’ says Martin. ‘They’ll sit on them and have a barbecue inside.’ But for an insect expert they posed several questions.

One termite mound usually equals one termite colony, with the mound acting as a home for the insects, but Martin knew that there wasn’t enough of the termites’ preferred food (dead leaves) to feed that many insects. ‘When we cut into the mounds, there was nothing in there,’ he adds. To crack the problem he began to study a smaller group of about 50 mounds in a nearby forest. The first clue was that none of the individuals around the mounds were fighting, which meant they were all from one colony rather than 50 separate ones. By digging, the team then started to unearth a vast underground network – the mounds, rather than providing homes, were merely the result of excavation work with the termites living in the subterranean tunnels. The amount of soil excavated by this process is over 10 cubic kilometres and represents one of the biggest structures built by a single insect species.

Professor Roy Funch, one of the authors of the resulting report, provides a clue as to the size of the mounds (Image: Stephen Martin)

Many questions still remain. In this dry area of thorny scrub forest, known as caatinga or ‘white forest’, food is only available for one or two months every year when the rains come and the forest blooms. Martin doesn’t yet know how the termites store enough leaf matter to survive. Other intrigues include the fact that it’s not clear how the termites breath. ‘You often hear of termites having amazing ventilation systems to get rid of the carbon dioxide, but these are completely sealed,’ says Martin. ‘It may be that they are highly adapted to living in low oxygen levels. I suspect there is a lot of very unique biology involved.’ Then there’s the fact that despite a high frequency of forest fires in neighbouring areas, the caatinga suffers almost none. Again, Martin suspects that the millennia-old termite population could be the reason why – by eating all the dead leaves the insects remove any tinder.

There’s plenty of work to be done, but for now Martin is enjoying the wonder of discovery. ‘It’s staggering that this type of thing, on this scale, has never really been seen. No one had worked out the extent. That’s because a lot of us work behind screens, and it’s only getting into the field where you can see it. It’s been a real joy being involved, because it’s only once in your lifetime that you ever get to find something like this.’

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The new year still remains a popular time to set life goals and career targets. There’s no reason why that shouldn’t include your photography, says Keith Wilson

Out with the old and in with the new. Traditionally, this is a time to reflect, but more importantly to look ahead to what the next 12 months may hold. Whatever your level of skill or proficiency, take some time away from that umpteenth mince pie or turkey cold cut to ask yourself what you would most like to achieve in the year ahead to make a positive difference to your photography. Will entering a photo competition get you the recognition you think you deserve, or should you spend a day getting expert tuition at a workshop?

Perhaps there is a personal project you’d like to pursue or a location that you have always wanted to photograph? And what about all those images that you just don’t know what to do with? If you’re a budding photographer, chances are one of these questions applies to you. Of course, the first resolution we all need to uphold is to make time available for any photographic goals that we set for the year ahead.

IN IT TO WIN IT

Nothing galvanises better than setting a target or a deadline. Even better if there’s a motivating factor at play. Competitions are a great way to make you look at your images again, but this time within the parameters set by a competition theme and the accompanying rules. Success can lead to publication, worldwide media publicity as well as any prizes on offer. Then there’s the feel-good factor of having your photography acknowledged by a panel of experts who may not have seen your work before.

Some people rule themselves out of entering competitions because they don’t believe they have a chance of success, but even entering is beneficial as it helps you gain insight into the type of images judges choose, thereby helping you to evaluate your pictures from a different perspective. As the saying goes, you’ve got to be in it to win it.

In 2017, the British environmental photographer Aaron Gekoski won the photojournalist category of the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. It was the first time he had entered. Up to then, his attitude to entering competitions reflected that of many others who had never entered before. ‘I was always kind of sniffy about competitions for some very bizarre reason,’ he says. ‘I’d think, “no, I don’t need to enter, I know I’m doing good work out there’.’’ But Gekoski hadn’t bargained for the benefits of competition success. ‘I hadn’t anticipated how much recognition and more importantly how much coverage the competition would give for my subject, because I had emails from all over the world. So, I have made a very conscious effort to enter competitions from now on.’

Of course, not all competitions receive the same level of publicity as Wildlife Photographer of the Year, but there are numerous others, covering practically every aspect of nature and geography. Landscapes, gardens, the underwater world, mountains, mammals, birds, travel, British wildlife, European wildlife, even drones – each has their own dedicated contest. In fact, more than a hundred photo competitions can be found on the US website photocontestinsider.com. Then there are regular competitions run in photo magazines and online sharing platforms. By taking part you are doing more than just pitching your work against your peers; you are opening your eyes to the work of others and the approaches and techniques they employ.

Christian Vizl's photo of a nurse shark in the Bahamas was shortlisted for the People's Choice award of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition

EXPERIMENTATION

‘It’s always about getting out of your comfort zone,’ says award-winning filmmaker Rob Whitworth. ‘If you’re just doing the same thing again and again and it’s getting easier, you’re probably doing something wrong and people aren’t going to be interested anymore.’ Whitworth specialises in making timelapse videos, admittedly not one of the most widely practised genres of image making, but one of the most thrilling and memorable. The BBC Natural History Unit describes him as ‘the most accomplished hyper-lapse cameraman of our day’, but less than ten years ago he was an unknown photographer, living off his girlfriend’s salary in Vietnam while devoting his time to perfecting this painstaking technique. ‘I spent a year experimenting and shooting time-lapse, deliberately not doing any other work and not posting anything online, just trying to refine my skills,’ he recalls. ‘At the end of that year I posted my first video online called Traffic Frenetic in Ho Chi Minh City. I had no following, yet within three days it got 700,000 plays and the attention of the world’s media. That encouraged me that I had made the right decision to focus on time-lapse.’

PLAYING THE FIELD

Whitworth’s experience is an example of why it’s important to specialise and devote your energies to improving technique through experimentation. Documentary photographer Jasper Doest is another who believes in the importance of experimenting, or ‘playing’ as he calls it, especially when you think you have exhausted all the creative possibilities. ‘When you get to the point of “now what?” just start playing,’ he says. ‘I think playing is very important even when 90 per cent of the time nothing comes out, but it helps for getting to know your tools and these tools are the only thing you have as a photographer.’

Both Doest and Gekoski devote a lot of their photography to long-term projects, often years in the making. In Doest’s case, it is about the relationship between humans and macaque monkeys in Japanese culture, while Gekoski continues to document the abuse of animals for entertainment in zoos and tourist resorts in Southeast Asia. What’s striking is the dedication required for these projects and the need to research and garner knowledge about a subject so that the resulting images convey an accurate and comprehensive depiction of the story being told.

Closer to home, Britain’s Andrew Parkinson has gained international renown for his ongoing work photographing mountain hares in the Cairngorms; Richard Peters specialises in urban wildlife, winning awards for his photos of foxes and badgers that make nightly visits to his back garden in Surrey and the landscape photographer Rachael Talibart drives to England’s south coast to photograph seascapes whenever there is a hint of stormy weather. Each of these photographers set themselves an on-going project featuring a subject or location they genuinely love and there is no set time limit. As Talibart says: ‘I think the simple advice is, shoot what you love. I love the coast so that’s what I’m going to do.’

Like many professional photographers, Talibart also runs one-day landscape photography courses, called f11 Workshops. These are not photo holidays, she stresses, but an opportunity to learn and develop skills first-hand on location. ‘We’ve got oodles of clients who just book, rebook, rebook, so we’re getting to know them,’ she says. The success of these workshops is down to the sense of community and shared learning among the participants. ‘I enjoy that and I learn from them just as much as they learn from me. Everyone sees differently.’

Seeing differently, gaining a fresh perspective, experimenting – these are all central to a photographer’s development and essential for finding that niche subject, theme or style. Expert one-on-one tuition is hard to beat for mastering the practical lessons of exposure, timing, filtration, lens choices and composition, but if that spare day out isn’t possible or the course is booked, there are other ways to hear experts’ words of wisdom.

When he’s not shooting commissions, signing prints or conducting his own one day workshops on London’s Hampstead Heath, Matthew Maran records podcasts which he shares freely on his website matthewmaran.com. So far, he has made ten with photographers (including Jasper Doest and Andrew Parkinson), picture editors, publishers and designers. ‘These conversations give an insight into the lives of creative professionals,’ he says. ‘I decided to set about interviewing these individuals, to shed new light on what goes on behind the scenes and what it means to be a creative freelancer and make it work as a career.’

CRITICAL FEEDBACK

Maran’s podcasts are packed with advice and first-hand experience. While there is a wide variety of ideas and experiences to draw upon, the need to find a specialist niche is a common recommendation, best expressed by the Bristol-based wildlife photographer Sam Hobson: ‘Don’t try to be a jack-of-all-trades with your photography. If you shoot everything you’ll end up having tons of mediocre pictures. If you do something really creative with one subject, you’ll get your images out all over the place.’

Of course, image sharing sites like Instagram, Flickr and 500px, as well as the ubiquitous Facebook, make it easy to get your images ‘all over the place’ and to build a following. In the best-case scenarios, this can be enough to launch a career, as it did with Rob Whitworth’s first time-lapse video. ‘Thanks to the online platforms you can just do your creative thing and put it out there and the audience will come to you if it’s good,’ he says. However, if success proves elusive, then expert feedback will have a greater value than any online audience. This is why submitting your work to picture editors on magazines and image libraries and seeking their opinion is so valuable. After all, they are choosing the images that their reputations and businesses depend upon. Editors can seem harsh but responding well is the key to publishing success.

Conservation photographer David Plummer puts it like this: ‘It’s a case of reading the feedback, so just go at it again and be persistent. When an editor turns you down, don’t give up. Just say, “well sod you, I’m going to produce the best work you ever saw!” I don’t think that learning process ever ends, unless you let it end.’

This was published in the January 2019 edition of Geographical magazine

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After decades battling environmental crises that threaten to rob the Galápagos Islands of their unique biodiversity, the restoration of giant tortoises is a success story worth celebrating. But more conservation challenges still await the iconic archipelago

A cloud of dust blooms as I hit the brakes, my bike skidding to a stop. Suddenly, the world is quiet. Holding my breath, I watch as Tamara tiptoes silently down the dirt path ahead. As I flick my camera alive, she silently gestures towards the nearest of some dome-shaped rocks scattered along the path. The dappled morning light makes it difficult to distinguish head from toe, shadow from shell, but as she turns back to me, eyebrows raised, the significance of this moment begins to sink in. ‘Tortoises,’ she whispers eagerly, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice.

It’s almost impossible to think about the Galápagos Islands without a giant land tortoise slowly lumbering into your mind’s eye. The islands are even named after the iconic animals; a galápago being an old style of Spanish saddle which early sailors found comparable to the distinctive shell shapes of the tortoises. Here you’ll find one of only two populations of giant tortoises in the world (the others are more than 10,000 miles away, on the Seychelles’ Aldabra Atoll). While the Galápagos tortoises are divided into two main types – saddlebacks, whose arched shells allow them to reach up high to eat, and domed, whose more restricted shells were designed for foraging on the ground for food – there have been 15 different recorded subspecies, all restricted to their own particular environmental niches by open water and restrictive terrain.

Galápagos is the only place on earth where marine iguanas are found in the wild

DARWIN’S LEGACY

It hardly needs stating that the Galápagos are of utmost international importance in terms of biodiversity, with some of the highest levels of endemism anywhere on the planet. Of the 1,073 World Heritage Sites currently listed by UNESCO, the very first to be classified, back in 1978, was the Galápagos Islands. ‘A unique “living museum and showcase of evolution”,’ is UNESCO’s loving description of the islands, labelling them ‘a “melting pot” of marine species.’ Hence, 97 per cent of the total land surface of the islands, more than 7,600 sq km, was designated as the Galápagos National Park in 1959 (leaving just 237 sq km for the roughly 30,000 residents).

But the islands weren’t always seen for this scientific importance. Initially, they were well-known primarily for their rugged and abrasive image. Even the man who famously changed the hostile reputation of the Galápagos, simultaneously going on to revolutionise not just biological science, but much of the modern world, wasn’t entirely enamoured with their aesthetics. ‘Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance,’ wrote Charles Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle, recalling the Galápagos leg of his famous journey around the world.

After a couple of hours flying over the Pacific Ocean, I have to concur with the great naturalist. Dark, rust-coloured rocky outcrops began emerging over the horizon, their mildly undulating terrain, punctuated by remnants of past volcanic activity, are visibly home to only a few dry shrubs and cacti (being in the Pacific ‘dry belt’, the islands have year-round high temperatures, with very low rainfall). Stepping off the plane at tiny Baltra airport, the surrounding landscape appears barren, with no shade to escape the brutal equatorial sun. As first impressions go, it presents a vision of a tough, unforgiving corner of the world.

Despite the plethora of images of the bearded and distinguished face of an elderly Darwin which are plastered on the tea towels and fridge magnets for sale at the airport gift shop, he was, in fact, a fresh-faced 26-year-old when he visited the Galápagos, spending five weeks exploring the islands in September and October 1835. And while Darwin certainly gave over plenty of his time during the visit to documenting the unique wildlife, including seriously testing the resolve of marine iguanas (‘I threw one several times as far as I could, into a deep pool left by the retiring tide; but it invariably returned in a direct line to the spot where I stood’), it was the tortoises which appeared to most grab his attention. ‘I frequently got on their backs, and then giving a few raps of their shells, they would rise up and walk away,’ he wrote, ‘but I found it very difficult to keep my balance’.

Prior to the arrival of humans, it is estimated that the Galápagos was home to roughly 250,000 giant tortoises. From the 1500s onwards, passing whalers, pirates and buccaneers began stopping by during their sea voyages, having discovered that the animals had the unfortunate survival ‘tactic’ of being able to stay alive while upside down, without food or water, for up to a year. Grabbing a few tortoises on the way past would therefore provide a constant source of fresh meat throughout a long journey. Even the young Darwin himself indulged in this unique Galápagos gastronomy during his stay, noting that ‘the breast-plate roasted... with the flesh on it, is very good; and the young tortoises make excellent soup’. Between 100,000 and 200,000 tortoises were wiped out by hungry whalers and early settlers.

In recent decades, there has been one tortoise who rose above the rest to become almost as much of a Galápagos Islands celebrity as Charles Darwin himself. This individual was the last remaining Isla Pinta tortoise, a subspecies thought to have long since gone extinct. In a mind-bending exercise in contemplating true loneliness, it is believed that he was spotted in 1906, when researchers from the California Academy of Sciences arrived on Isla Pinta to remove three fellow tortoises, but since he was in too difficult a location for them to reach, they left him behind. This exile only came to an end in 1971, when a Hungarian biologist named Dr Joseph Vagvolgyi arrived to study snails, and later casually mentioned to friends that he had seen a tortoise on Isla Pinta. Experts rushed to the island and found the animal in question. He may well have wandered the island alone for 65 years, hence his name – Lonesome George. Studied intensely over the following four decades, with never-ending attempts to get him to mate with females from other islands, George eventually passed away in 2012, at over 100-years-old, and without any surviving descendants, making him the last ever Pinta tortoise.

SPY IN THE CAMP

It was with all this in mind that I find myself excitedly gawping at the sight of three... no, four... no, five wild Sierra Negra giant tortoises nonchalantly dozing in the morning sun during a bike ride on Isabela, the largest of the islands. Each measures two-to-three foot from head to tail, with scaly, ungainly feet poking out from underneath their thick shells. As Tamara Campaña, resident Galápagos National Park guide, explains in a hushed whisper, the obviously bumpy shells of these animals clearly indicate them to still be in the fresh flush of youth, probably only around 20- or 30-years-old, perhaps not even yet at sexual maturity (without the predatory interference of humans, tortoises are capable of living to 150-years-old and more). The distinctive rings on their shells will gradually fade away over time, leaving elder tortoises with far smoother shells. The ancestors of these individuals were the lucky ones. Historically, Sierra Negra tortoises were the most populous of all subspecies, in theory a significant survival buffer when humans began feasting upon them and their shelled cousins across the archipelago. ‘When people were colonising Isabela, the closest place to get giant tortoises was the highlands,’ explains Tamara. Specifically, this meant the Sierra Negra volcano itself (at 10km across, the second largest caldera in the world). From once being as populous as 70,000, numbers collapsed to between 100 and 200 by the 1950s. It took the end of piracy and the establishment of the National Park to finally stabilise the population and begin their painfully slow recovery.

Even this wasn’t the saving grace for Isabela’s tortoises. A mortal threat persisted in the unlikely form of feral goats. These animals, introduced to the islands in the 1800s, had come to number more than 100,000. Devouring native vegetation, they were wiping the landscape clear of the essential plant-life upon which tortoises were reliant for both food and shade.

So dire was the situation, the Galápagos National Park took the drastic step of launching ‘Project Isabela’ in 1997, hiring helicopters to fly across the island, shooting dead any goats they found. They even recruited so-called ‘Judas goats’, who would be fitted with radio collars and set free to try and find others. Once a new group was located, they would all be shot, except the tagged goat, who was again set free to try and find another group, and so on. By the time the project was wrapped up in 2006, the only goats remaining on the island were a few hundred tagged Judas goats. The Sierra Negra tortoise population has now recovered to around 1,000 individuals, still critically endangered but, as Tamara remarks, nothing like as bad. Returning to our bikes, we cautiously wheel around these peculiar creatures, being careful not to invade their personal space.

Despite the efforts of conservationists, Lonesome George died without any live offspring

GO, DIEGO, GO

Isabela is also home to the Arnold Tupiza Chamaidan Giant Tortoise Breeding Centre, a place which can claim some credit for rescuing, among others, the Sierra Negra tortoise. Opened in 1995, it is now home to a number of breeding adults, whose 250 or so annual hatchlings are helping repopulate the islands by being returned to their respective territories once they reach eight-years-old. A colour-coded map by the pens informs us which part of the island each population originally belongs to, and therefore where their offspring should be returned.

Around the corner, an excited crowd is leaning over to peer into a pen filled with baby tortoises enthusiastically working their way through a stalks-and-leaves lunch. These youngsters – each of which would fit comfortably on the head of a tennis racquet – are still highly vulnerable to another threatening invader, the rat. Likely transported here by accident by those same sailors who so developed a taste for tortoise meat, these rodents remain the largest threat across the islands. ‘Once they are over three-years-old, all the babies live outside,’ explains Tamara. ‘Before that time, they are living in special enclosures because the rats can come in and eat the babies.’

It was the rescuing of tortoise eggs in 1965 from tiny Pinzón island, where rats were about to wipe the subspecies out entirely, that first instigated large-scale Galápagos giant tortoise restorations as we see them today. For example, half a century ago the Española island giant tortoise was another subspecies flirting with extinction, thanks, again, to the efforts of whalers and goats. By 1960 there were just 14 tortoises left on Española, 12 females and two males. Enter a saviour, nicknamed ‘Super Diego’ brought over from San Diego Zoo in 1975. Diego has become probably the islands’ most famous tortoise after Lonesome George, and could be credited with almost single-handedly rescuing his subspecies, having since fathered more than 800 offspring. More than 2,000 giant tortoises have now been repatriated to Española, and the population is reportedly self-sustaining. ‘I would say the Española species is the most successful breeding programme in the Galápagos,‘ enthuses Tamara. ‘We are not sure about the genetic problems they could have because brothers and sisters will probably mate. But we need to wait at least 50 years to see that.’

Santa Cruz is the most populated of the islands, and a tourism focal point

BACK FROM THE DEAD

Across clear, jade-coloured waters and golden bays, I find myself en route for the central island of Santa Cruz, a short flight over from Isabela. Tortoise breeding facilities can now be found across the archipelago’s four inhabited islands, and, being where most of the Galápagos’ human population lives, Santa Cruz is the centre of most of this conservation work.

Driving across Santa Cruz, a mist hangs over the central highlands, where thousands of tortoises now live wild across the island’s highland farms, sharing the grassy enclosures with domestic cattle. In Puerto Ayora – the most populous town on the archipelago – sits the beachside resort of Finch Bay, and, a short walk along the coast, the Charles Darwin Research Station. Here, as well as the stuffed body of poor Lonesome George, young tortoises from across the whole archipelago can be observed, researchers watching them grow through every stage of their young lives. A prominent whiteboard outlines the 5,000-plus tortoises that have been repatriated to each island from this centre since 1970, including 1,825 to Española and 1,007 to Pinzón.

It also shows many tortoises being relocated to nearby Santa Fe. This small, uninhabited island, a shadowy entity visible on the horizon from Finch Bay, is another with a turbulent history. ‘In the beginning, they thought there were no tortoises at all there,’ explains Monica Reck as we race across the waves on a Finch Bay day excursion yacht towards the distant isle. Reck, a Santa-Cruz-based Galápagos National

Park guide, explains how the relatively recent discovery of bone and skull fractures on the island was the first evidence that, as with the other islands, there was once a healthy Santa Fe tortoise population, likely becoming completely extinct in the mid 1800s. Nevertheless, the drive to return tortoises to Santa Fe has been a strong one, and between 2015 and 2017, 400 juvenile Española tortoises – believed to be the nearest surviving match to the Santa Fe tortoise – were released on the island, as an ecological replacement for their lost Santa Fe cousins. For the first time in 200 years, Santa Fe had become home to wild giant tortoises.

Floreana is another island with a remarkable story attached, one which also starts with the decimation of its tortoises by humans, and the subsequent declaration of their extinction. However, in the north of Isabela, almost bang on the equator, lies Wolf Volcano, the largest in the entire Galápagos. While this part of the island has its own native tortoise population, it also happens to have been the dumping ground for tortoises over the centuries when sailors decided they’d had enough tortoise meat. The animals were pushed overboard and required to swim back to the island. When they made it, they would have interbred with other tortoises from all over the islands. Hence, while the Floreana tortoise was indeed wiped out on Floreana, its genes may well have lived on around Wolf Volcano. Sure enough, late last year it was announced that individuals had been located that were genetically close enough to the original Floreana tortoise that it could essentially be declared un-extinct. Repopulating the island in the same manner as Española, but from an even more dire situation, could yet be the Galápagos’ most unbelievable conservation comeback story.

In many ways, the internationally famous story of Lonesome George, and the failure to get him to produce live offspring, warps the reality of conservation in the Galápagos. Giant tortoises were once in serious trouble, but there is no doubt that their restoration over the past half century has been a genuine conservation success. Across the Galápagos, there are now an impressive 50,000 giant tortoises, with the restoration of many populations meticulously planned and executed. It might even be time to end some of the large-scale breeding programmes, with facilities focusing only on a few vulnerable subspecies. ‘We have recovered most of the populations in the Galápagos,’ explains Tamara. ‘We need to keep a balance. If you release thousands of giant tortoises in an ecosystem, they will eat everything, and then the vegetation will have problems.’

Scalesia Lodge, a modern resort built within the forested slopes of Isabela, has just adopted 12 juvenile giant tortoises into a special on-site enclosure. ‘It’s a big responsibility, because you have to take care of them,’ insists Felipe de la Torre, general manager of Scalesia Lodge. ‘You have to build the area where you’re going to have them according to their regulations. It’s quite expensive to feed them, because of the costs of getting transportation up to where they get the otoy [the staple food of tortoises, also known as arrow leaf elephant’s ear].’ If tortoise numbers continue to grow as they are, breeding centres might well need facilities such as Scalesia Lodge to take responsibility for the care of more and more individuals.

Despite all this success, it is important to remember that it’s taken half a century of intense funding and arduous science just to get to a point where most giant tortoises are safe from the immediate threat of extinction. ‘On some islands, the repatriation program may indeed end within ten years or so,’ acknowledges Linda Cayot, science advisor at the Galápagos Conservancy. ‘However, other populations will require this work for up to 30 to 50 years.’

She highlights the recent updating of the IUCN Red List, which still categorises the various surviving giant tortoises subspecies as ranging between, at best, ‘vulnerable’, and at worst ‘critically endangered’. ‘One of the major reasons for this is the difference between historical and current day populations,’ she explains. ‘So we still have a long way to go.’

Blue-footed boobies are another threatened species

ONGOING RISKS

Biodiversity in the Galápagos is still extremely precarious. There are no shortages of crises affecting the unique ecosystems of the islands, from the warming sea waters and lack of habitat which is driving the decline of the Galápagos penguin, to the lack of food which is starving the blue-footed booby, to the seemingly unstoppable spread of the giant African land snail, considered by experts to be one of the most destructive snail species in the world.

Perhaps most at risk though are one of Darwin’s other iconic animals, the finches whose beaks helped him devise his ground-breaking study of evolution (‘one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends’, he noted during his visit). On the face of it the birds appear fine, whizzing around and picking up scraps, seemingly as plentiful as pigeons. However, these and other land birds have become increasingly afflicted by the presence of Philornis downsi, an invasive parasitic fly which makes itself at home in their nests. Upon hatching, the larvae feed on the blood of the chicks, causing fatality rates close to 100 per cent. Population numbers of land birds continue to decline, and some species, such as the mangrove finch, are already on the brink of extinction. There is one case study which dares bring hope to the hearts and minds of conservationists battling such problems: the Australian ladybug. These insects were intentionally introduced in 1999 to control the spread of the cottony cushion scale, an invasive insect which threatened over 90 plant species. Twenty years of research suggests that it has been successful. ‘They had to do so many [post-introduction] studies to ensure this wouldn’t hurt anything else, because we were introducing an animal on purpose,’ recalls Monica. ‘It is controlled, and the ladybugs are not bothering anything else.’ Now, the ladybugs prey exclusively on the scale, keeping a lid on their population.

As yet there has been no obvious predator that could solve the looming finch crisis, or to the multitude of other environmental issues which undoubtedly keep Galápagos conservationists awake at night. But there remains hope that the interest, strict regulations, funding and, perhaps most importantly – optimism – generated by the slow restoration of the iconic Galápagos giant tortoise might yet pave the way to ensure the islands remain a unique biodiversity hotspot for generations to come.

As another new year beckons and the fight to protect the climate continues apace, Marco Magrini sends a message to the planet we call home

Happy new revolution around the sun, dear Spaceship Earth. You wander through the cosmos at breakneck speed – at 66,000 miles per hour around your star, at 487,000 miles per hour around the Milky Way’s centre and, together with the Milky Way, at 536,000 miles per hour around the local group of galaxies. Yet, oddly enough, the living creatures you carry aboard have a mystifying impression of stillness.

This could be why the current dominant species (the self-named Homo sapiens) hold the wrong idea about your boundless sturdiness. They think you are ‘too big to fail’, while in reality you are too big, too frail. Perhaps it is because of this misconception that this year, an estimated 8 to 12 billion tons of plastic will be added to your oceans and 55 billion tons of carbon dioxide will be emitted into your delicately balanced atmosphere.

The number of humans you ferry through the universe has just crossed the 7.5 billion mark. Of course, not all of them deny the fragility of your warmer atmosphere, of your thinner glaciers and more acidic oceans. For instance, the Club of Rome just issued a much-needed ‘Climate Emergency Plan’ where the first of many recommendations reads: ‘No new investments in coal, oil and gas exploration and development after 2020.’

Yet, not enough people believe there’s a man-made emergency to be faced and as a result many doubt that oil states and multinationals will ever refrain from digging out their fossil revenues.

As you remember, gamma radiation of 500 million years ago and a meteorite of 66 million years ago already caused mass extinctions. Another one is expected by the end of the century but, for the first time since your formation 4.5 billion years ago, it will be self-inflicted. All life you carry is interconnected. From bacteria to elephants, all species depend on their habitat as well as on each other. The so-called sapiens do not grasp this reality too well. But don’t worry, whatever they do, nobody can ever halt your cosmic merry-go-round.

Happy new year, Spaceship Earth. And thank you.

This was published in the January 2019 edition of Geographical magazine

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A half century has passed since the ‘Earthrise’ photograph – widely believed to have launched the global environmental movement – was taken

They call it the ‘overview effect’ – the feeling that astronauts have when they look down on the Earth and appreciate the fragility of the planet, the thin skin of atmosphere wrapped around this uniquely wet and diverse celestial body. Perhaps astronaut Commander Frank Borman summed it up best on Christmas Eve 1968, while orbiting the Moon in the spacecraft Apollo 8. ‘There’s a beautiful Moon out there,’ noted the radio message beamed up from NASA HQ in Houston.

‘Now I was just saying that there’s a beautiful Earth out there,’ quipped back Borman.

‘It depends on your point of view,’ concluded Houston.

Yet the most famous moment of Apollo 8’s orbits – eight months before Armstrong and Aldrin finally set foot on the Moon – had come nine hours earlier, when the astronauts were distracted during a scheduled photography session by a dramatic sight emerging from the darkness. ‘Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there!’ commented someone, likely lunar module pilot William ‘Bill’ Anders. ‘Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!’ Several minutes passed as the astronauts scrambled around, searching for a colour film to capture shots of the planet, with the cratered lunar surface in the foreground.

The resulting images – the first to show Earth from space – would go on to become immeasurably famous under the name ‘Earthrise’. The following year it became a US postage stamp and would go on to adorn countless T-shirts, magazine covers and works of art. Life magazine labelled it one of the ‘100 photographs that changed the world’, while Time include it as one of the 100 most influential images of all time.

Perhaps most significant is the impact it had on the environmental movement. ‘Earthrise marked the tipping point, the moment when the sense of the space age flipped from what it meant for space to what it means for Earth,’ wrote Dr Robert Poole, reader in history at the University of Central Lancashire, in his 2008 book, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth. The first Earth Day was marked in the US just over a year later, in April 1970, while the founding of environmental organisations such as Greenpeace wasn’t far behind. For the first time, the rest of humanity experienced a hint of that astronautical overview effect.

Kathleen Rogers President of the Earth Day Network‘When I talk to people, Earthrise comes up all the time as a motivating factor, not just for Earth Day, but for their engagement in the environmental movement. The sense that they belong to something bigger, that they had a greater responsibility than local environmentalism. The photo, above all, created this sense of community, that it was not just a local environment, or even a national environmental issue, but one that was global. It took on a dimension that was both environmental and spiritual. It may have been one of those rare science-spiritual stories in the history of mankind.’

Tony Juniper Environmental author, campaigner and sustainability consultant ‘The moment that astronaut Bill Anders read passages from the Book of Genesis from the command module of Apollo 8 as it emerged from the dark side of the Moon was one that literally changed our perspective forever. The image the crew captured of our planet rising above the surface of our lifeless moon helped to kick-start the modern environmental movement, inspired by the very visual fact that we inhabit a living world which is suspended in the empty blackness of space. For the first time in history, we were no longer solely an Earth-bound species.’

James Lovelock Originator of the ‘Gaia’ theory‘As long ago as the 1930s I became aware of space through the books by Jules Verne, H G Wells and others, to say nothing of the abundant American pulp magazines such as Astounding Stories. Even before the Second World War, the artist Chesley Bonestell had painted imaginary views of planetary surfaces. For these reasons the Earthrise photographs were not entirely surprising. Even so, it was thrilling to see the Earth from outside and be amazed at how blue it was. Floating like a jewel displayed on the black velvet of outer space. Arthur C Clarke commented that we should have called our planet Ocean, not Earth. More than 70 per cent of the view was that of the ocean. The view of the Earth led us to realise how special was our planet and led me to see it as a self-organising entity, something that the author William Golding called Gaia.’

Dr Mike Maunder Director of Life Sciences at The Eden Project‘Those images speak of the beginnings of two extraordinary scientific ventures that are very relevant today. That little blue orb supported 3.5 billion people (7.2 today and rising), the elms were dying in the UK and the great rainforests were largely intact. The term “plant genetic resources” was introduced at the 1967 International Conference on Crop Plant Exploration fuelling a path to one of humanities’ great conservation achievements, the global network of seed banks. Similarly, the Green Revolution officially started in 1968, courtesy of USAID, while increasing harvests it drove us towards today’s unsustainable food system. We are still wrestling with food security and sustainable agriculture, the next 50 years will be a roller coaster.’

Mark Nelson Biospherian, ecologist and author‘Pondering our relationship to Biosphere 1 [Earth’s biosphere] led me to recall how space exploration changed human consciousness. Photos of Earth from the darkness of space stunned the world. For the first time, humanity saw the Earth, this spinning blue and white world which contains everything we value. Apollo astronauts enjoyed “Earthrise” over the horizon of the Moon. Their unique experience was called the “Overview Effect”. It was a thrilling, life-changing perspective, the first humans separated from Earth’s biosphere.’ Quote taken from Pushing the Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2 by Mark Nelson

Denis Hayes National Coordinator of the first Earth Day and Chair of Earth Day 2020‘The striking image in “Earthrise” – of a lovely planet, all by itself (aside from a barren moonscape) – conveyed a clear message that we must all come together to save it. For those of us working today on climate change, ocean acidification, endangered migratory species, and other worldwide threats 50 years later, that image of Earthrise remains lodged in our subconscious.’

This was published in the January 2019 edition of Geographical magazine

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Are howler monkeys being adversely affected by ingestion of pesticides containing sulphur?

The forests of Costa Rica are home to the mantled howler monkey, a primate with a dark coat of fur and a few flecks of orange on their sides that is native to Central and South America. Over the past five years however, some individuals have been spotted sporting conspicuous blotches of yellow fur.

Researchers first noticed the unusual colouring through the use of camera traps, installed on bridges that the monkeys use to cross roads. At first it was a rare occurrence but, as time went on, the frequency of affected monkeys increased along with the spread of the discolouration. While the first photos revealed monkeys with light limbs or tails, as if they’d dipped their extremities in yellow paint, by 2017 the team were encountering monkeys that had almost fully changed colour.

A mantled howler monkey with a normal dark-coloured coat and a splash of orange on its sides (Image: Ismael Galván)

Dr Ismael Galván, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) was one member of the team that studied this phenomenon. His initial thought was that it could be a genetic issue. ‘When I saw these pictures I got really surprised,’ he says. ‘At first I thought that it was a rare mutation in some gene involved in the synthesis of melanin pigments, like the MC1R gene, as animals with these mutations occur from time to time in nature. These cases, however, are rarities, isolated.’

Probing further, Galván began to investigate the chemical nature of the pigment responsible for the anomalous colouration. By analysing the hairs of the monkeys, he discovered that the pigment being produced by the follicles had shifted from one called eumelanin that results in dark hair, to a lighter pigment called pheomelanin. It was this shift that alerted the team as to one potential cause of the colour change.

The pigment pheomelanin occurs when the eumelnain pigment you’d expect to see in a dark-haired animal is incorporated with sulphur. While the content of sulphur in hair follicles can be determined by genetics, environmental factors can also influence it. Most of the monkeys spotted with patches of yellow fur were observed in forests very close to intensive cultivations of pineapple, banana and African palm oil. One thing these plantations have in common is the fact that sulphur-containing pesticides are used on their crops.

‘We believe it is likely that pesticides are the cause of the change,’ explains Galván. ‘Recent studies show a strong use of pesticides in these cultivations, and a rise in the import and use of pesticides in Costa Rica in the last few years. Howler monkeys probably ingest significant amounts of pesticides with the leaves that they take in their diet.’

It isn’t yet known what impact the lighter fur might have on the monkeys, though one concern is that it will make them more easily detected by predators. The next step for the team is to test its hypothesis further to determine if pesticides really are causing the change, as they deem likely. As sulphur is a component of most pesticides it could mean a lighter life for the howler monkeys, though perhaps in colour alone.

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The ethnographic study, carried out by geographer Dr Amy Donovan from the University of Cambridge, is the culmination of a four-year research project on transboundary volcanoes that included Iceland as one of several case studies.

Dr Donovan visited Iceland during the 2010 and 2014-2015 volcanic crises. The paper highlights the difficulties Icelandic civil authorities, like others around the world, face when managing tourists who are attracted by the country’s range of volcanoes, particularly during eruptions.

Group of tourists at Fimmvorðuháls Eyjafjallajökull (Image: Dr Amy Donovan)

The research reveals that the key driving force for volcano tourists during an eruption is spectacle and awe; being near a live volcano was listed as being very appealing. Dr Donovan emphasises the visceral experience tourists have when experiencing an eruption: many people don’t realise there is a sound experience as well as visuals. Even if only at the stage of lava flows, a deep guttural noise is created that can be very impressive, sounding similar to breaking glass.

Interviews with people on the ground during eruptions revealed emotional responses to witnessing them at a close proximity and a heady mix of fear for other’s safety, sheer fascination, and powerlessness.

The paper also explores how eruptions like Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, which is referred to by locals as ‘the tourist eruption’, can attract tourist attention and be viewed as ‘adding value’ to a trip. At the time, the caldera of Katla volcano, submerged under more than 200 metres of the Mýrdalsjökull glacier, became a motorway as tourists from Iceland and further afield crossed the glacier to reach the eruption site. Their treacherous journeys involved driving up steep slopes of ice, in snowmobiles or snow scooters, and crossing crevasses.

Dr Donovan argues that situations such as these, during which two tourists got lost on the glacier and froze to death, will only add to the frustration felt by local authorities, who already work hard to combat the risks. Yet for the tour companies involved, 2010 was a record year, helped by the eruption’s picturesque volcanic fire fountains.

Holuhraun fissure (Image: Dr Amy Donovan)

While Iceland relies heavily on income from tourism, increased budgets and labour are needed to monitor and protect the growing number of visitors who are ill-equipped, and at times even ignore official safety advice. The Holuhraun eruption in 2014-15 resulted in one group of tourists hiring a private helicopter after dark and landing near to the eruption site. They purposefully disobeyed safety advice in doing so.

Dr Donovan said: ‘Many active volcanic countries face the dilemma of wanting tourists, but also wanting to keep people safe, which creates a difficult conundrum. In Iceland, we are witnessing an increase in road accidents even out of season, with tourists ill-prepared for the challenging driving conditions. This research highlights the careful balance that needs to be found between the positive impacts of tourism and ensuring that visitors are responsible, not putting themselves, or others, at risk.’

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The majestic and mighty polar bear is in danger of becoming an animal of the past, consigned to the growing list of extinct species, yet polar bear tourism is increasingly popular, says Keith Wilson

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates that fewer than 26,000 polar bears reside across the vast Arctic wilderness, from Alaska and Canada to Greenland, Norway and Russia. Accurate counts are hard to make as the bears spend much of their active time on the move, travelling with the ever-shifting pack ice, hunting for the seals that are the mainstay of their diet.

In recent years, the polar bear has become an international symbol of the dangers of global warming and climate change, the apex predator most at risk due to the rapid thawing of Arctic ice, caused by warming ocean currents and rising atmospheric temperatures. From 1980 to 2016, the average volume of Arctic sea ice decreased by 42 per cent. The ice has receded so much that in 2014 the Nunavik became the first cargo ship to traverse the notorious Northwest Passage unescorted in order to transport nickel from the Canadian province of Quebec to China. The voyage took 26 days, more than two weeks less than the 41 days it took the ship to return to port via the Panama Canal.

SHRINKING HABITAT

With the prospect of more such voyages taking place in future as the ice recedes, plus the possibility of new deep water ports opening along Arctic sea routes, human contact with polar bears is likely to increase. But it is the continued loss of ice, more than the appearance of container ships in the Arctic, that poses the most immediate threat to the polar bear’s future. The thinner and more scarce the sea ice, the harder it is for these bears to traverse their frozen domain and seek out the prey they need to gain enough weight to survive the dark winter months.

Time also plays a factor in the bears’ survival because the weeks between the summer thaw and the sea freezing over again are increasing across many parts of their range. This results in a shorter hunting season in which to find enough prey. Increasingly, bears are adapting to the lack of year-round ice by scavenging closer to human settlements or spending summers on ice-free islands, trying to subsist on seabird eggs, a poor substitute for the substantial meal provided by a seal. With these factors stacked against them, it is entirely appropriate that polar bears are held up by conservationists and climate scientists as the signature species for all that could be lost should the Arctic continue its thaw. And yet, despite these grim statistics, Arctic tourism has never been more popular.

THE SVALBARD PARADOX

In the rugged terrain of the Svalbard archipelago above Norway, polar bear tourism has become an increasingly important part of the local economy, even though the ice stretching from the islands to the North Pole has shrunk alarmingly. Since 2004, professional Arctic tour guide and photographer Ole Jørgen Liodden of WildPhoto Travel has led more than 40 photo expeditions from Svalbard for tourists wanting to see wild polar bears. His observations of the year-to-year changes since then are stark: ‘In the first years, clients actually complained about too much ice. Then, in 2010 it was the first year in July that we could actually go around the northern part of Svalbard. Before, you had to wait till August or September, but now it’s ice-free and you have to go up to 82 degrees north to reach the edge of the polar ice. So, it’s changing a lot.’

This degree of change in little more than a decade is rapid in climate history and the reasons lie not in rising air temperatures but in warmer ocean waters beneath the ice. Liodden explains: ‘The thing about Svalbard is that it is the most western part of the Barents Sea and the Gulf Stream just reaches the western part of Svalbard. When I checked the Svalbard ice chart in mid-October, the temperature in the water was four to six degrees. The water is getting warmer, it’s getting two, three, four degrees warmer.’

Warming waters, longer summers and thinning ice point to a dangerous trend confronting polar bears, but Liodden says the animals are not becoming harder to find. ‘This is a paradox,’ he says. ‘We have done maybe 70 or 80 trips now from Svalbard and this year we averaged 20 polar bear sightings per trip.’

TELEPHOTO TO WIDE-ANGLE

What has changed for Liodden and other seasoned Arctic photographers is the type of pictures they take, which is also resulting in the use of different styles and techniques. Up to 2010, their main objective was to photograph the bears as close as possible and to depict them as prominent figures. They used long telephoto lenses or medium zooms such as the long end of a 70-200mm zoom. That all changed once the northern reaches of Svalbard became ice-free during the summer months. Liodden became intent on portraying the polar bear’s new predicament, adrift on an ever-thinning ice sheet.

‘Switching to a wide-angle lens and showing the loss of ice, that was the first thing, but now I’m more concerned about showing the thin layer between the air and the water,’ he says. ‘For the last two years, I’ve been doing more with underwater housings and fixing a camera to the end of a pole at the edge of the ice and trying to see both the polar bear above and under the ice. It is just a thin layer and I can show how fragile this is and the fact it’s getting thinner.’

Liodden uses a wide gamut of lenses for his polar bear photography, from a 600mm telephoto to a 16-35mm wide-angle zoom, fixed to a camera protected by a waterproof housing. ‘I have this lens taped on a 20mm setting,’ he says. The camera and lens are fixed to a pole, which Liodden carefully holds from the deck of a boat or an inflatable Zodiac craft to take his split-level images. ‘Usually, I shoot above sea level with shallow depth of field, but underwater you actually need to do the opposite, you need more sharpness because light behaves completely differently underwater.’

With the camera and lens in a housing, all settings have to be made before it is locked and sealed. ‘I try to make everything very simple when shooting underwater because I’m trying to limit the number of factors that can go wrong,’ Liodden says.

A DEEP DESCENT

Things do go wrong, even for an experienced professional. Liodden freely admits to losing more than one lens overboard: ‘I have dropped a few lenses. I have a very nice 24-70mm at 81 degrees north, a thousand metres down. It’s very deep there.’

That said, his advice on photographing polar bears and the other wonders of the Arctic wilderness is worth listening to. His number one recommendation is to be based on a well-equipped ship and make daily forays to outlying islands and ice-strewn waters on a Zodiac boat. The advantage of using a ship, he argues, is that visitors have somewhere to sleep, eat and enjoy a high degree of comfort. He adds: ‘You don’t have a tent, you don’t have a snowmobile, you don’t need to survive overnight. It also makes it easier because you can dry your camera, you can recharge your batteries, you can download and check your pictures.’

When out on the Zodiac with freezing ocean spray, a dry bag is essential for keeping your camera and lenses dry when not in use. Many cameras use exterior weather-sealed components in their construction, but the Arctic is an extreme environment and the combination of salt water and freezing cold is a real test of operation and performance, not to mention your own tenacity.

Don’t try changing lenses when out on the water either as this increases the risks of dropping your gear or getting salt water onto your sensor or internal lens elements. Once in the Zodiac, stick to the lens you have on the camera – choosing a zoom will at least give greater compositional options.

HUNTING THREAT

Liodden is fearful about how long his beloved bears will be around to be admired and photographed by his clients. While climate change remains the greatest long-term threat to their future, in recent years he has uncovered another, more immediate danger that few people know about – hunting. Liodden explains that he is referring to hunting carried out legally. ‘The extent is serious,’ he says. ‘Between 800 and 1,000 polar bears are killed every year and the demand is increasing. At some point it will trigger more illegal, more grey market trade. And this is when it gets bad.’

Polar bear hunting is being driven by an increasing demand for the their skins, mostly from China and Russia. Liodden’s findings are the result of four years of intensive research and will be the feature of a book, Polar Bears and Humans, to be published next spring. ‘Since 2006, the demand is mainly from China. It’s a big issue for the polar bear and it has to stop,’ he says. ‘There will always be some kind of subsistence hunting, or “problem bear” killing, but if you can stop the trade we take the reason away for people making so much money.’ By using the camera instead of the gun to track and hunt polar bears, Liodden argues that not only do the bears survive, but communities make more money in the longer term because ‘local people can sell the same polar bear more than once, to more than one person.’

Although not an ideal scenario, the polar bear’s survival may yet hinge on an increasing number of tourists venturing above the Arctic Circle to photograph them clinging to their diminishing realm.

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Exciting news for wildlife and photography enthusiasts alike – the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of The Year competition run by the National History Museum has just announced a new award: the LUMIX People’s Choice Award

You may have seen our article on the winners of the main competition, which were entirely decided by a judging panel, but now, in its 53rd year, for the first time ever members of the public are able to have their say on the competition’s best submissions.

From a shortlist of 25 images, pre-selected from over 45,000 entries, voters can choose their overall favourite. With voting open until 5 February 2019, there’s plenty of time to browse the selection, but only one vote is allowed per person.

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The winning image will be exhibited at the museum in London from February to June 2019, alongside the top picks from the main competition. What’s more, the top five voted photographers will be displayed on the official Wildlife Photographer of The Year website.

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The award comes alongside a rise in the profile of wildlife photography, having become increasingly more accessible and important amid concerns about climate change, deforestation and illegal wildlife trade. The hope for the organisers is that by having the public engage with the award in such a direct way it will help to inspire creativity, evoke yet more compassion towards animals and further support wildlife photographers as they continue in their pursuit of truth and beauty.

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The 25 contending shots for the LUMIX People’s Choice Award are full of impact and originality, subtle tones and strong textures. Likewise, the photographers contending for the award are as diverse and distinctive as their submissions themselves. Most images reflect the personal backgrounds of the creators behind them, who range from Spanish deep-sea divers and Norwegian Arctic explorers to advocates of British wildlife and African conservationists.

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Some of the entrants also departed from their usual signature styles, such as Anna Henly who trialed a highly artistic approach with contrasting patterns and monochrome. Others, such as Antonio Leiva Sanchez and Franco Banfi, made use of techniques such as high-speed and long-exposure photography to capture movement and light in futuristic ways.

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Many of the shots are designed to evoke particular messages. The images of Federico Veronesi and Phil Jones, for example, provide a dynamic look at the struggles within the animal kingdom, whereas Suzi Eszterhas and Justin Hofman comment on how human interference can either help or hinder our wildlife respectively.

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Colourful, underwater macro-photography features in the intriguing photos of Pedro Carrillo and David Barrio; whereas Christian Vizl and Rob Blanken fly the flag for elegantly sharp and simple portraiture.

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A running theme across a large proportion of the entries is the portrayal of group or family dynamics between animals, with Bence Mate, David Lloyd, Konstantin Shatenev and Tin Man Lee among others conveying ideas of playfulness, love and teamwork. However, if you prefer more intimate work which depicts a personal story of endurance or emotion, you may wish to vote for the likes of Audren Morel or Cristobal Serrano.

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Whatever the outcome of this award, one thing’s for sure – all 25 images demonstrate the adventurous nature of a wildlife photographer, by showcasing the daring practises employed to get shots which genuinely need to be seen to be believed. Whether it be using aerial or underwater photography, hiding out in the wilderness or facing dangerous subjects head-on, these contenders manage to achieve angles, lighting and perspectives which provide new and revealing insights into our wild world.

A new system of robotic aerial vehicles is revolutionising the tracking of migratory species across remote environments

Wildlife tracking is nothing new, but it’s certainly not without limitations. When pursuing animals – particularly birds – across rough terrain, traditional methods such as VHF tracking can become inordinately challenging, with the necessity to attach trackers to individual animals, the signal of which can become lost within rugged and uneven landscapes. One such example are the endangered swift parrots of Riverina in New South Wales, Australia, which migrate across a large region, and are among those whose unpredictable movements are unsuitable for traditional tracking methods.

A newly developed fleet of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) aims to solve this problem. ‘The swift parrot was the original inspiration for the development of the system, since we were faced with the daunting task of trying to locate these small, migratory birds that move dynamically across vast landscapes,’ explains Debra Saunders, a researcher in conservation ecology at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University. ‘In terms of conservation management we needed to shed light on their movements so we could better protect the habitats they depend on. Swift parrots are too small to attach large satellites or GPS tags, therefore we had to track radio tags to study their movements. But they use different areas of habitat each year depending on where their food is available, so we had to find a new way to search large landscapes more efficiently.’

The swift parrot was the inspiration for the new UAVs (Image: Stuart Hay, ANU)

Because of the unique characteristics of these particular UAVs, they need only fly in the near vicinity of the parrots to sense them and track their whereabouts (as opposed to other systems that need to fly directly overhead for a visual sighting). This means the birds appear unperturbed by their presence. ‘One of the key aims of radio-tracking wildlife is to understand and observe natural behaviour so the last thing you would want to do is disturb the animals you are tracking,’ adds Saunders. ‘Our system uses sensors that listen for tag signals, and works most effectively at a distance so it can triangulate the animal’s location without disturbing it.’

Developments in robotics are also improving the lifting capacity and flight duration of UAVs and Saunders points to their future potential: ‘This provides a key step forward in the development of more advanced, integrated and autonomous environmental monitoring systems. It means that we can now track animals in more remote and rugged landscapes that were previously inaccessible, and shed light on species that have been prohibitively difficult to track until now.’

This was published in the December 2018 edition of Geographical magazine

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Technology used in creating safe urban environments is now being used in South Africa’s wildlife parks to catch and deter poachers

Wandering around the world’s major cities, it’s impossible not to miss the ubiquitous CCTV cameras. While this may be a point of discomfort for those concerned about personal privacy, security authorities argue that sophisticated, intelligent networks of cameras capable of facial recognition and licence plate tracking, among other technologies, are highly effective in their primary purpose of keeping the city’s inhabitants safe from crime.

A new system from software and security firm AxxonSoft – the mastermind behind the ‘Safe City’ project, a video surveillance product operational across a global network of 240 cities – is now bringing this same approach to conservation, under the ‘Safe Parks’ label. ‘AxxonSoft’s deep learning technology, which is applied to both our Safe Cities projects and Safe Parks, is the same technology, it has just been adapted and “taught” different outputs in terms of what to look for from a surveillance point of view,’ explains Colleen Glaeser, global marketing director at AxxonSoft. Similar to the Safe Cities system, which is capable of deciding, for example, whether to raise the alarm about abandoned items on public transport, the Safe Parks system is constantly accumulating information and improving its knowledge about what constitutes a false alarm (it might be the movement of animals) or a real threat (the presence of known criminals).

AxxonSoft camera and software at work

The system was first installed within a number of South African wildlife parks earlier this year (although where exactly it is in operation is currently a closely-guarded secret). By installing cameras around the perimeter of parks and game reserves, security forces can adapt their approach to poaching. Rather than constantly trying to apprehend criminals in the aftermath of poaching incidents, they can immediately send rangers and/or camera drones to hotspots when alerted by a smart software system that red flags likely poachers before a crime is even committed. ‘It means rangers can move from a “reactive” to a “proactive” response,’ says Glaeser. ‘This has proved very successful in preventing killings as the team is able to get to the scene of the crime quickly.’

This was published in the December 2018 edition of Geographical magazine

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Brazil’s shift to the right of the political spectrum could be bad news for the natural world, suggests Marco Magrini

From the natural world’s viewpoint, Brazil’s new choice of president is a bad sign. The country is home to more than 60 per cent of the Amazon, a forest acknowledged to be one of humanity’s best insurances against runaway climate change. Unfortunately, Jair Bolsonaro has already suggested that his new, right-wing Brazil will soon lower the bar for environmental protection and start exploiting the Amazon for logging, farming and mining.

For the climate, no news could be worse. Deforestation is responsible for 11 per cent of global CO2 emissions because, once felled, trees release the carbon dioxide they have previously captured via photosynthesis back into the atmosphere. It’s why Norway (an oil-producing country with a guilty conscience) has invested nearly $2billion over the last ten years to slow down tree logging in the Amazon. And it worked: after a disastrous year in 2004 (28,000 square kilometres of tree cover was destroyed) Amazon deforestation has slowed to well under 10,000 square kilometres a year. Germany and the UK have now reached a similar preservation agreement with Colombia.

With the election taking place last month, Bolsonaro has at least four years in power and it looks as if he may use this time to blackmail the world, utilising a system in which those who want to preserve the Amazon have to pay a bounty. It’s a stance that may be familiar to Vladimir Putin who has previously pointed to the fact that Russia’s immense forests allow the world to breath, while skirting over its role as one of the biggest producers of oil and gas. Brazil, a much smaller oil producer, may try to play the same card.

Admittedly, being blackmailed by a ruthless populist like Bolsonaro will not be pleasant. Yet, other countries proven to have a poor record on civil rights, such as Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Venezuela, have all been exploiting the world’s oil addiction and collecting a perpetual stream of dollars. Is handing over money to Bolsonaro any worse?

Humankind needs the forests in Brazil (and those in the Congo, Indonesia and Siberia) merely to survive. This is why options are limited. When a man around the corner commands you to ‘stand and deliver’, there are not that many choices.

This was published in the December 2018 edition of Geographical magazine

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Laura Cole travels to Orkney to find out why numbers of harbour seals have fallen by 78 per cent since 2000

Any luck, Mònica?’ asks the bartender in the Sands Hotel pub, pouring a drink for the ecologist just taking her seat. Outside the window, a storm is rolling in. It shakes a pyramid of lobster cages and rankles the sea. But the pub is warm, even noisy, for a weekday evening. Over the hubbub, Dr Mònica Arso says: ‘Pupping season has just started, so we’re starting to see some newborns at the haul out sites.’ She knows she hasn’t answered the intended question, that of Orkney’s most pressing mystery – what is causing the major decline of its harbour seals? ‘It’s still early days,’ she adds and takes her drink, examining the weather outside. She will need to go over the storm forecast before her 5am start searching for seals.

Orkney is a group of islands ten miles off the northeast coast of Scotland. The archipelago’s impressive profile is clearly on display from the viewpoint at John o’Groats on the mainland. Low-lying green humps on its east side and the sheer cliffs of Hoy in the west. The vista seems to lure travellers over from the northeasternmost tip of the Scottish mainland. ‘How could I resist going a bit further?’ the curious travellers may say on the ferry crossing the Pentland Firth. Orcadians have a name for such visitors – ‘ferry loupers’. Once off, you find that the largest island, Mainland, serves as a gateway to yet more islands such as Westray, Eday, Sanday, Shapinsay, and further again, to Shetland. They seem to have a way of drawing visitors ever onwards, into the North Sea.

A rarer sight: harbour seal numbers have nosedived by 78 per cent since 2000

It’s this location in the North Sea that also makes the archipelago so alluring to wildlife. The powerful strait running under its southern side is a vital passage for porpoises, dolphins, orca and minke whales. Its cliffs are living walls of fulmars, great skuas, auks and other sea-birds. Then there are the seals. Orkney is an internationally significant breeding ground for grey and harbour seals, and every day thousands hunt and haul out around its shores. Seal remains have been found among the islands’ 5,000-year-old neolithic sites, suggesting that humans have shared the beaches for millennia. It’s even thought that Orkney gets its name from the Old Norse Orkneyjar – or ‘seal islands’.

In the past 20 years however, something major has changed. Harbour seal numbers have nosedived by 78 per cent since 2000, prompting alarm from marine biologists. Similar trends appeared in the Shetland islands with declines of 30 per cent, and the Tay estuary at 95 per cent. Bizarrely, populations in the west of Scotland seemed to have remained stable. Harbour seals in Orkney began to appear with unusual wounds – clean-cut spirals or ‘corkscrews’ around their bodies. ‘Initially we thought it was propeller blades,’ says Ross Flett, who runs Orkney’s seal rescue centre. Experts have been investigating if the two findings were linked. More fundamentally, they are searching for the causes for decline, and whether it is set to continue.

Long-term studies watching marine populations are Dr Arso’s ‘thing’

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

It’s this question that brought Dr Arso to Orkney in 2015. She is an ecologist at the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) at the University of Saint Andrews, 160 miles south of the islands. It was the unit’s helicopter surveys that first revealed the magnitude of the decline and that Orkney had the most to lose. Its harbour seal population had dropped from 8,500, one of the largest in the UK, to just 1,800.

What the SMRU needed was long-term monitoring from the ground, a study that could compare crippled populations in the east of Scotland with the strong populations in the west. Arso was up for the job. While some might baulk at the idea of spending whole summers alone on windy cliffs, long-term studies watching marine populations are ‘her thing’. Like a biologist-Poirot, armed with a long-range scope and a clipboard, she scouted potential locations to observe Orkney’s seals during the pupping season. She came to South Ronaldsay island and found Widewall Bay, which had good access to a small population of around 100 seals. To get a true sense of how many used to be here, however, she needed to talk to an Orcadian.

‘There were around 500 at one point,’ says George Rouse. A farmer for almost all of his 75 years, he used to farm an uninhabited island called Hunda by crossing a causeway. ‘When I took the tractor across it, the seals would follow me along the water, back and forth, back and forth,’ he says.

‘There were so many, we considered setting up hides for tourists and making a business out of it,’ says his son, Magnus Rouse, a drystone waller. ‘But then [the seal numbers] began to drop.’

Orkney's current harbour seal population is around 1,800, down from 8,500

When Arso arrived, the Rouses helped her find one of her cliff locations to monitor the seals. ‘They know the area better, and I needed to get as close to the seals as possible,’ she says. Seals are curious. They’ll swim close enough to scrutinise you with big blinking eyes, then they’ll follow, even blow bubbles. ‘But only when they are in water,’ says Arso. ‘When they haul out to rest, they feel more vulnerable and won’t let us close.’

Since meeting Arso, the Rouses often speak to other islanders about the decline. ‘It’d be hard to find anyone living near the water who isn’t worried about it,’ says George. Sometimes they speculate about the causes. ‘Maybe there isn’t enough food for them anymore,’ offers Magnus.

It’s possible. In fact, lack of food is one of three suspect causes. ‘But first we need to see where the decline is happening,’ says Arso, ‘and the key to that is females.’ It’s why, every day of pupping season for the last three years, she has counted and identified females and whether or not they have offspring with them. ‘If they don’t produce pups that will tell us something, if the females themselves decline that will tell us something else,’ she explains.

GREY MENACE

‘Mine was curled up on the grass, it was just so beautiful, this wee thing,’ says Nyree Harper, a community nurse in her early forties and keen seal watcher.

‘Mine half frightened me to death. I walked down to the cliff and –whah! – there it was, 15 feet up the slope,’ says Heather Parry, a 60-something swimming fanatic.

The my-seal-your-seal conversation is a common one for Harper and Parry. Both live on the water’s edge of Widewall Bay and see the pupping season first-hand. Both are also ‘newcomers’, the Orcadian name for people who were lured on a permanent basis to Orkney. Both stayed for the waterside life: Harper for foraging Widewall Bay’s saltwater plants, Parry for swimming in its icy water.

Nyree Harper, an Orkney island resident, examines the coast

Even in the short time they have been here, they have noticed fewer harbour seals. ‘At first I wondered if they were moving,’ says Parry. ‘If there are more in the west, maybe they could just be going that way.’ But that was before something unusual washed up on her beach. It looked like a 1980s mobile phone and had a Saint Andrews label. It was a tracking tag.

When she returned the tag to the university she discovered it had been attached to a Widewall female seal for a year. ‘What came back was a bunch of scribbles,’ she says, describing the map the seal had created. ‘It showed that the female seal had spent all her time going back and forth just within Widewall Bay.’

Arso had been the scientist at the other end of the email. ‘We got solid data from 2016,’ she says. ‘We tagged ten seals and it helped reaffirm what we suspected, which is that they are pretty consistent to place.’ In other words, they haven’t just moved. ‘Whatever is affecting them is affecting them here.’

In talking, Harper and Parry bring up another suspect. ‘There are still lots of grey seals around. Some people still worry when you hear them singing.’

The grey seals share many of the haul-out sites with harbour seals. Larger in size and greater in number than the harbour seals around Orkney, their mournful song has made them the subject of local folklore for centuries. Many of the stories of shapeshifting seal people – or selkies – originate from the archipelago. ‘Some people still won’t let their dogs go near them, because they are worried seals will tempt them into the water,’ says Harper.

In reality, grey seals don’t present much of a threat to people or dogs. A harbour seal, however, might have more to fear. In 2014, a grey seal discovery shocked scientists. On the Isle of May, a biologist watched a male grey seal snatch a grey seal pup and drag it to freshwater pool. Holding the pup underwater, the male killed the pup, ate some of the blubber and left the same spiral injuries found on the harbour seals. ‘The perpetrator was finally caught in the act,’ says Arso.‘The male was seen killing and eating four pups within the next few days.’ The resulting research paper was nicknamed the ‘Hannibal Report’ and researchers now knew that grey seals were capable of inflicting the mysterious ‘corkscrew’ marks on their prey. The question is are they doing it to harbour seals as well? The larger animals have now become the foremost suspects for the decline of the harbour seals.

Grey seals like these may be one of the culprits of the harbour seal's decline

‘The master’s students I teach love that story,’ Arso adds with a tone of warning. She feels it’s important that we don’t become blinded and assume that this is the only factor at play. ‘Outside of the killings, it’s also vital to look at how greys might be competing with the harbour seals within the environment – for a decreased food supply, for example,’ she says.

RESCUE MISSION

Seals are protected in Orkney, but that has not always been the case. During the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of grey and harbour seals were culled both due to a perceived threat to the fishing industry as well as for sealskins. The culls were met with huge protests which put Orkney at the centre of an international debate.

That’s when Ross Flett moved here. With a platinum ponytail and walrus moustache, Flett cuts an imposing figure, further emphasised by a bassy Glaswegian voice. Originally a hydroelectric engineer, he came to work on Orkney’s diesel power station and got caught up in anti-cull campaigns on Westray island, where a cull of 2,000 pups was planned.

‘We knew that some of the culling was for handbags to sell to tourists,’ he says, ‘so we went out to the islands and starting spraying the pups with pink dye.’ The protesters achieved their goals. The last major cull for fishing was called off in 1978 and a European ban on seal skin ended the market.

Today, the Scottish government still allots licences to shoot seals that cause trouble for industrial fishing and they remain controversial. ‘However their numbers are not high enough to be responsible for the magnitude of the declines,’ says Arso. ‘Shooting is no longer considered a primary cause.’

Ross Flett now runs the island's seal rescue centre

Flett never went back to hydroelectric work. The diesel power station was made redundant by the arrival of subsea cables. ‘Which was just as well,’ he says as he had fallen into a new kind of work. In 1977, an Orkney environmental group found a sick harbour seal pup off the coast of Mainland and as the only member with a house near the water, Flett took it in. ‘I had no idea what to do with it. Didn’t have a clue,’ he says. Suzy, as he came to call her, lived in his bathroom for weeks. When she got bigger, he could take her to the rock pools 100 yards down a steep track from his house. ‘Eventually she didn’t want to come out of them, so I’d have to go in there and bring her back myself,’ he says.

When Suzy was old enough, he released her back into Orkney waters. Since then, he has founded the islands’ seal rescue centre, and has rereleased hundreds of grey seals, harbour seals and even the odd otter into the wild.

In 40 years of working with seals, Flett has seen viruses take out high numbers, but there were always animals with symptoms to explain what was happening. ‘This time, they just seem to be disappearing, I have never seen anything like it,’ he says. ‘Maybe it’s something in the water?’

TOXIC WATERS

Flett’s guess is key to the final suspect – harmful algae blooms. ‘Blooms can create substances that are toxic, which accumulate up the food chain,’ says Arso. Such blooms occur naturally but they can be influenced by human activity near the coast. Scientists also predict that climate change might be increasing their frequency and intensity. According to 2015 study by the SMRU, toxin levels were found to be significantly higher at sites of seal decline. In more recent years, the SMRU has taken samples of Orkney seals and confirmed low levels of toxins, however ‘there’s evidence of low levels of these toxins in all UK seals,’ says Arso. ‘It could be that chronic exposure is taking its toll.’ More samples are needed and seal corpses are sent to marine labs to detect the presence of the toxins.

Food, grey seals and toxins. ‘That’s where we’re at right now,’ says Arso. ‘In fact, our studies are pointing to it being a combination of all three causes.’ She has one pupping season left in Orkney and is hopeful about the results. ‘If there is no decline – great news,’ she says. ‘If there is a decline, then at least we will have captured it on the data. We will be in a much stronger position to pinpoint the losses and do what we can to reduce them.’ It’s important work because the fate of a small population in Widewall Bay could have implications for seals all over Scotland’s coasts.

This was published in the December 2018 edition of Geographical magazine

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The unprecedented frequency of winter tick epidemics have resulted in a 70 per cent death rate for New Hampshire’s moose calves

In the late 1970s, the forests of northern New England, which span the US states of Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, were devastated by an outbreak of spruce budworm, a species of moth that in total defoliated around 55 million hectares of forest, more than double the area of the UK. In response to the outbreak, landowners were forced to clear cut extensive areas of the forest, a move that proved controversial. Yet one animal, now beloved by New Englanders, was set to benefit. The new habitat created by the widespread tree-felling was perfect for moose which moved in to the area in abundance. Numbers of moose peaked in the mid-2000s, making the animal emblematic of the region.

There are still plenty of moose in New England – more than 60,000 – but over the last 15 years scientists and locals have noticed changes in the population. Daily reports of skinny, weakened calves as well as dead animals started to pour in, often from locals travelling on common snowmobile trails. As concern about the moose grew, one symptom in particular hinted as to the cause of the problem. Many of the moose were suffering from extreme hair loss, a condition known as ‘ghost moose’ due to their visible white skin. It was something residents had seen before and indicated that while the moose may have benefitted from one parasite with a hunger for trees, another insect was now busy killing them.

An adult cow moose photographed in early May in New Hampshire displays the typical hair loss associated with a high winter tick load. Their appearance is often referred to as a ‘ghost moose’ (Image: Dan Bergeron/NH Fish and Game Department)

The winter tick has been present in New England and implicated in moose declines for at least the last century. Rising concern resulted in a new survey of moose and ticks, carried out between 2014 and 2017 in the forests of New Hampshire, the results of which have recently been published. The researchers found that epidemics of ticks, known as epizootics, occurred in each of the three years surveyed. They also uncovered a mortality rate of 70 per cent for moose calves – two phenomenon that were undoubtedly linked. Taking into account the period before the study, epizootics have occurred five times in nine years in northern New Hampshire and central Maine. The relatively small population of moose in New Hampshire is estimated to have fallen from approximately 7,500 to 4,000 animals.

According to Peter Pekins, a professor at the University of New Hampshire and one of the researchers involved in the survey, these findings reveal an unprecedented number of tick flare-ups. ‘The shocking thing in the study is the frequency of what we term epizootics,’ he says. ‘They should be very abrupt periodic events. The frequency we noted has never been reported before, never anything like that.’ Pekins and the other researchers found that dead calves were usually emaciated and often harboured horrifyingly high tick loads – up to 90,000 ticks per calf. Each insect can remove 2-3mm of blood from an animal and so calves with infestations suffer from chronic blood loss and acute anaemia.

A patch of hide shows a cluster of engorged adult female ticks (Image: Henry Jones/University of New Hampshire)

Pekins and his team have a theory as to why this increased frequency is happening and it all relates to climate change. Ironically, the winter tick actually thrives in warmer conditions. The ticks attach to moose as larvae during the autumn, when they crawl up plant stems and await a host. The larvae develop into nymphs and then adults and drop to the ground in April, having fattened up on the host’s blood. If cold weather kicks in later than usual it provides the larvae with a longer time period to attach to the moose and this is exactly what happened in the epizootic years. ‘We know that winter is starting later and later so what that effectively does is provide more and more time for these larval ticks to find a host. The loads on moose just get higher,’ says Pekins. He is very clear that despite these losses, moose are not an endangered species. As he points out, it’s not in the interest of the parasite to completely wipe out the host. But he does expect numbers of moose to drop, both as a direct result of calf deaths and because badly affected females suffer from delayed sexual maturation.

As each tick can remove 2-3mm of blood, calves with infestations suffer from chronic blood loss and anaemia (Image: Peter Pekins)

Pekins’s goal is now to understand more about tick epidemics, with the ultimate aim of being to predict them and to assist forest managers. He also wants to use the moose as a powerful symbol. ‘There’s no survivor out there that looks great,’ says Pekins. ‘If you saw the “winning” animals in May, it’s like looking at the TV show The Walking Dead, they’re really moribund. To me the value of this story is to take this iconic animal and make it the poster-child of climate change in this region. That’s probably the biggest value we can get out of this because it is an icon. Everybody’s in love with moose.’

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Ocean debris, mostly composed of plastic, reaches remote Atlantic islands at ten times the levels found just a decade ago

Coastlines of remote, sparsely inhabited South Atlantic territories such as Tristan da Cunha, Ascension and the Falkland Islands, have, until recently, showed minimal evidence of human interference. ‘Three decades ago these islands, which are some of the most remote on the planet, were near-pristine,’ says Dr David Barnes, from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). This is no longer true. BAS research reveals that these island outcrops have experienced a one hundred-fold increase in debris – predominantly plastic, comprising more than 90 per cent – washing in from the ocean over the intervening 30 years. ‘In 2018 we recorded up to 300 items per metre of shoreline on East Falkland and St Helena,’ says Barnes. ‘This is ten times higher than recorded a decade ago.

Plastic debris found by Dr Barnes on the beach at St Helena

In recent years the BAS research ship RRS James Clark Ross undertook four research cruises in the South Atlantic, surveying the density of plastic and other debris on the sea surface, on the seabed, in the water column, inside native fauna and on shorelines. Levels of shoreline plastic are now comparable to those observed on highly populated coasts in North America, with around a third being comprised of microplastics (smaller than 5mm). They also counted plastic inside 2,243 animals, spanning 26 different species and the entire food chain, from zooplankton up to seabirds.

‘With all the initiatives and awareness, I had expected stabilisation – or possibly even an improvement – of the problem,’ says Barnes. While he emphasises the importance of cutting off the supply of plastic waste at the source, he also points to a series of local engagement projects on these islands that look to minimise the issue. ‘There are only small communities on Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, but there have been beach cleans and even scuba operations to try and clean plastics up in local environments,’ he outlines. ‘In the Falklands there have been even more concerted efforts with substantial clean-ups and surveys, and they have already been in contact with us about trying to do more. St Helena is really pushing on this, and as well as surveys, beach and scuba cleans, and nearshore water sampling, now it has won a new grant specifically to target plastic waste.’

This was published in the December 2018 edition of Geographical magazine

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With motion detectors becoming ever more sophisticated, and clearer, crisper image resolution available with even the smallest setup, remote photography is a vital tool in the geographic photographer’s kit bag, says Keith Wilson

Every household has one. Simply pick it up, point and press the button – play, pause, stop. For many of us, our knowledge of using a remote control ends there. This ubiquitous device seems to embody our point-and-shoot society in which we have become conditioned to making things happen automatically.

This conditioning also applies to photography where cameras have much in common with remotes, having evolved in just a few decades from a largely mechanical construction for controlling the quantity and path of light by manual operation, to a sophisticated electronic device that you simply have to point and press. Of course, a camera does more than just play and record, it creates images and the versatility of its use is limited only by our imagination and sense of adventure.

Photographers use remotes too – in fact, every day cameras are used ‘remotely’ from sports coverage to scientific research. In these instances, remote cameras aren’t triggered by the press of the photographer’s finger, but by the movement or action of a subject passing into the camera’s field of view. Images taken with a remote camera may imply that the photographer was right there at the time, eye to viewfinder, finger poised over the shutter button, but in reality that photographer was probably miles away from the camera, even tucked-up in bed asleep in another country. Remote photography is probably most widely seen in the ‘view from the net’ images of footballs passing through the fingers of diving goalkeepers. Obviously, the photographer is not crouching behind the back of the net at this moment, but their camera has been placed there and set-up, poised like a trap, ready to snap.

To catch a tiger

From the crowded confines of a football stadium to the forested foothills of the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, where remote cameras are used for a far less predictable occurrence than a match-winning goal. Here, the photographer’s target is Asia’s most revered and elusive predator, the tiger. The solitary nature of the world’s largest cat means that tigers have always been notoriously difficult to photograph. Now, as their numbers dwindle due to poaching and habitat loss, obtaining images of free-roaming wild tigers relies increasingly upon remote camera technology. It may be highly unpredictable and sometimes reliant on luck and guesswork, but the results can be impressive.

French photographer Emmanuel Rondeau captured one of the most striking portraits of a wild tiger in recent years when his remote camera picked up a Bengal tiger looking directly down the lens as it walked along a secluded forest path in central Bhutan. Of course, Rondeau didn’t randomly place his camera in position because he liked the surroundings. Working with a team of rangers, he had packed enough kit on his trek to set up eight still and eight video cameras. Placing them in the right position was critical to his success.

There were just 103 wild tigers in Bhutan at the last count, so Rondeau concentrated on areas that showed recent evidence of the cats – tracks, faeces, scratch marks – when deciding where to place his cameras. His goal was to photograph a tiger in its natural surroundings, so wide-angle lenses were used on the cameras, which were fixed on wooden posts in the spots deemed most tiger-friendly.

A camera trap census

With everything in place, all Rondeau could do was wait and hope. After 23 days and hundreds of false triggers by leaves and high winds, his perseverance paid off with this photo of a magnificent male tiger. The stripes and markings of tigers are unique to the individual and examination of the photograph showed that Rondeau’s tiger was one previously unrecorded in Bhutan. It was an exhilarating moment and an example of how remote cameras can enable more accurate population counts of endangered species.

Bhutan, India and Bangladesh are currently in the latter stages of their latest tiger census and camera trap photography is playing a significant role in determining the total count. During the last census in 2013-14, India counted 2,226 tigers, Bangladesh 106 and Bhutan 103. Although these numbers represented an overall increase on the previous census in 2010, they remain historically low as habitat loss and poaching continue to threaten the tigers. However, India remains confident that its figures will reveal another increase this year, good news from a country that is home to nearly 70 per cent of the global tiger population. Ultimately, the proof will be in the pictures.

That said, although images from carefully placed remote cameras can provide reliable counts, scientists insist that statistical protocols are also employed to determine how many tigers a known population is losing or gaining. The camera might not lie, but margins of error can be substantial. For example, tiger populations in the Western Ghats of southern India are known to vary from 3 to 15 animals per 100 square kilometres. According to Dr Ullas Karanth, the renowned science director for the Asia programme at the Wildlife Conservation Society, even thriving populations lose 20 per cent of their tigers every year due to fights, poaching and human conflict. These populations remain viable because tigers have high reproduction rates.

Motion sensors

So what did Emmanuel Rondeau use for his celebrated photograph? The camera was a Canon EOS 550D, which can be picked up for less than £200, and the lens a Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 zoom, set at 16mm – another inexpensive piece of kit, costing around £200. Connected to the camera were two separate flash heads; both flashes and camera were connected to wireless triggers positioned opposite the camera. The flash triggers were made by Camtraptions, founded by entrepreneur and wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas.

Based in Britain, Burrard-Lucas has spent nearly ten years developing and perfecting his own brand of remote camera systems, devising prototypes and trying them out in the field, primarily on location in Africa. His reasons are practical: only with camera traps is it possible to photograph nocturnal and elusive species. Rondeau’s tiger portrait is proof of the effectiveness of remote cameras, as is Burrard-Lucas’ own portfolio of African wildlife photographed under starlit skies. His Camtraptions wireless triggers are based on commonplace PIR (passive infra red) motion sensors, similar to those found in security devices. A cable connects the sensor to the camera, which is pointed in the direction of the intended subject. Sensors have a wide field of detection, sometimes wider than the lens, so it is possible for the shutter to be triggered before the subject has fully walked into frame. This can be easily modified by applying dedicated blinkers to limit the width of the sensor range.

Flash heads should not be positioned too close to the camera, in order to make shadows appear more natural and reduce any red-eye from the animal. Burrard-Lucas recommends setting the flash to TTL (through the lens) mode and the camera’s exposure mode to aperture priority. For a large amount of depth of field, to ensure maximum sharpness in the background and surroundings, the aperture should be set to f/8 or f/11. A high ISO setting of around 1000 will also place less reliance on the flash to illuminate the scene, thereby conserving power. All DSLR cameras have autofocus, but for this type of photography, focus should be set to manual and the camera focused on the area within the frame that you want your subject to be when it triggers the motion sensor. Finally, set the camera’s drive mode to continuous to keep taking pictures as long as motion is detected.

Tree-top perspective

As well as removing the need for a photographer to spend hours waiting for a subject that might never appear, remote cameras can also be deployed in locations a photographer may find almost impossible to reach. In the Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, Borneo, scientists led by Dr Cheryl Knott of Boston University place remote cameras high in the rainforest canopy to record the life and behaviour of the park’s orang-utans. Orangutans spend their entire lives in the tree tops, rarely venturing to the ground, so obtaining photographic records is not a straightforward exercise.

Tim Laman's photo of an orangutan, captured by a GoPro, won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition in 2016

Knott, a biological anthropologist who established the Gunung Palung Orangutan Project in 1994, is married to wildlife photographer Tim Laman, whose remote-camera photo of a young male orangutan climbing up a tree gained worldwide attention in 2016 when it won the coveted Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. Laman spent three days climbing up and down a tree by rope to place several GoPro cameras 30 metres above ground which would trigger remotely when orang-utans came to feed on the fruit of strangler figs entwined around the tree. Compared to other images of orang-utans, Laman’s photo provided a new perspective, showing a wide‐angle view of the forest below and a view of the orang-utan’s face from above.

A GoPro makes an ideal remote camera because of its compact size and versatility. The model that Laman used for his award-winning image, a GoPro Hero 4 can record both stills and video, as well as time-lapse images. It has a high 30fps frame rate and is also waterproof, ideal in a tropical rainforest.

Remotes on wheels

Back down to Earth, remote cameras have been developed to move and follow their subjects. Researchers and scientists, as well as photographers, are beginning to utilise a mobile remote camera called the BeetleCam, another invention from Camtraptions. It is basically a remote-controlled DSLR camera on wheels, which Burrard-Lucas developed to obtain low-angle stills and video images of animal behaviour, such as lions feeding.

BeetleCam’s movement can provoke the natural curiosity of its subjects. Responses to BeetleCam’s presence have varied from gentle pawing and playing to serious attempts at eating its contents. Unsurprisingly, some prototypes in Africa were ‘lost’ in development to the attentions of lions, but today’s BeetleCam housings are resolutely ‘tooth and claw’ proof. Something that reassures insurance companies.

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Natural capital is a way to quantify the value of the world that nature provides for us – the air, soils, water, even recreational activity. Advocates say this is crucial if biodiversity is to have any clout in a world governed by raw economics. Others believe the concept merely turns…

In summer, the west coast of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides is swathed with the glorious technicolour of flowers on the sea meadows, or machair. This dense, carefully maintained floral carpet of up to 45 species of flower per square metre is a perfect habitat for the endangered great yellow bumblebee, found only here, in Orkney and a few other flower-rich parts of the Highlands. Some may criticise the amounts of money being spent on safeguarding a single species of bee; in raw economic terms, the machair is unprofitable as the crofters that use the land graze sheep with little commercial value. ‘The question that gets asked is why should we bother looking after the machair?’ says Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at the University of Oxford and chair of the Natural Capital Committee. ‘But you quickly realise that the way to preserve the bee is to look after the machair. The reality is that the costs of maintaining the machair are far outweighed by the benefits – and benefits in material terms. The machair serves a public good in preserving a favourable landscape for the bumblebee. People benefit from knowing the bees are there. Visitors come, giving a tourist benefit. The flowers protect the soils. The economic case for maintaining the machair is very strong. In contrast, if you plough it up, it’s gone for ever.’

The arguments used by defenders of the natural world have changed over the decades. Originally they tried appealing to governments and industry that nature was worth saving for its own sake. As that fell on deaf ears, they resorted to more utilitarian arguments. Save an endangered species? Good: wildlife watching provides income from tourism. Stop cutting down the rainforest? Good, again: you make more money in the long-term from tourism and food supplies than from trees turned into garden tables.

Now there is a more nuanced concept taking hold and the bees of North Uist are an ideal example. The phrase ‘natural capital’ is an umbrella term for economically quantifying the world’s stock of natural assets – plants, animals, air, water, soils, minerals – which yield benefits that make human life possible. The concept is abstract. Traditionally ‘capital’ has been thought of as physical – the machines, tools and equipment used in the production of other goods. Increasingly though, the case is being put that our wealth and wellbeing also rely on natural capital. ‘The economy exists and prospers as a result of the enormous amount of “stuff” that nature gives us for free,’ says Helm.

This stuff includes clean air, water purification, energy, shelter, medicine as well as the ‘raw materials’ we use in the creation of products, such as wood, plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms. Further benefits include flood defences, climate regulation, pollination of crops and prevention of soil erosion.

But the benefits can be even more intangible and include cultural services such as recreational and spiritual value and a sense of place. ‘If you destroy a heathland, it’s not just the biodiversity that loses out but the people who use it for walking or for bird watching,’ says Chris Williams, senior programme manager at the New Economics Foundation (NEF). ‘The effect this may have on them doesn’t get taken into account. Natural capital puts an existence value on nature, not just a substance value. We need to make nature more prominent in decision-making by putting an economic value on the services nature provides.’

In short, natural capital is another way of looking at the long-standing problem facing the planet and mankind: that humans are depleting natural resources faster than the Earth can replace them, cutting trees faster than they mature, harvesting more fish than oceans replenish, and emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than forests and oceans can absorb. The case for natural capital is that if we abuse all this, we risk degrading the services that natural ecosystems provide, which in turn support our economies. ‘The idea is that natural capital not only informs better decision-making but it also makes sure that nature is factored into that decision-making,’ says Williams.

A further driving factor is that, according to Williams, ‘not many people in NGOs are economically literate. They talk from an idealistic perspective while at the same time working with oil, gas and fishing industries that have to think about their businesses and jobs. The attitude on both sides has been that you can either have economic growth or a healthy environment, you can’t have both. The notion of natural capital is to reconcile these two goals.’

‘In the world of conservation, people often think in black and white,’ adds Dr Anne Guerry, lead scientist and chief strategy officer at the Natural Capital Project, a Stanford University-led partnership of WWF,the Nature Conservancy, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Minnesota. ‘Often, conservation-minded people think of human impacts on the environment as a bad thing and setting aside protected areas as a good thing when in fact there are lots of shades of grey. If we re-frame that thinking to include awareness of the many ways that nature sustains and fulfils human life, we can begin to make more informed choices with better outcomes for both people and planet.’

Natural capital demands a different way of looking at how global economic systems are valued. ‘People say we should just let the market sort things out but it hasn’t done that, it’s only exacerbated things,’ says Williams. ‘Markets and GDP are no indicators of true value, otherwise a hedge fund manager or a footballer wouldn’t be worth far more than a paediatric heart surgeon. A processed sandwich full of palm oil will be cheaper than something from a farmer’s market, but the cheapest thing should be the one that is the most sustainable.’

(Mapping: Ben Hennig)

Biodiversity HotspotsThe hotspots of biodiversity identified by Conservation International aim to draw a picture of the richest and the most threatened reservoirs of plant and animal life. Shown in this map are the major biodiversity hotspot regions in relation to the global population distribution. The map shows a gridded population cartogram which gives equal space to each living person. It therefore is a representation of the most threatened unique ecosystems in their setting in and around human populations. This gives one insight into the immediate human impact on these vulnerable areas of the world’s biosphere.

MARKET FAILURE

If you’re looking for evidence to back up the assertion that humans are depleting the planet’s resources you are spoilt for choice, but WWF’s Living Planet Report 2014 is a good place to start. This showed that population sizes of vertebrate species – mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish – have dropped by more than half in fewer than two human generations. The report also calculated that we need one and a half Earths to regenerate the natural resources we currently use and that 60 per cent of ecosystem services – water supplies, fish stocks, fertile soils and storm protection – are already in decline because of human impact.

With a global human population on course for nine billion by 2050 the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) has forecast that the world needs to produce at least 50 per cent more food by then, compared with 2009. Over the same period, global meat consumption will increase by 65 per cent to 460 million tonnes a year. ‘We are living beyond our means,’ says Helm. ‘If we dip too far into this natural capital there will be grave consequences.’

Environmental AccountingThe embedding of the concept of natural capital into industry and businesses will see corporate responsibility taken to meaningful – and long overdue, suggest critics – levels of scrutiny. The key to applying natural capital is the development of a new wing of the bean-counting profession: environmental accounting. As the obligations countries signed up to through the Paris Treaty begin to work their way through national legislation, companies will be required to account not just for their own immediate carbon emissions but for those from joint ventures, subsidiaries and other organisations. They will also have to set operational boundaries – the scope of emissions, from direct to indirect, such as from purchased electricity, accrued via employee travel, waste, contractor vehicles and product use. ‘The question is, where do you stop?’ asks Williams. ‘If you are a shoe company you can probably quantify how much water is used to raise the cow that provides the leather you use. But do you then also calculate the impact arising from desertification from overuse of the rivers by your industry?’

The accountancy sector is aware of the issue. Qualifications for ACCA, the global accounting body, now include environmental reporting and in 2015, ACCA, together with Fauna & Flora International and KPMG, published a major report on the subject called ‘Is Natural Capital A Material Issue?’ This concluded that a three-level approach for quantifying carbon and other environmental impacts was likely to prevail. Scope 1: a company’s own emissions; scope 2: emissions that include those of their supply chain; and scope 3: the end-products a company produces and the environmental impact these have. The report concluded that scope 3 would prove the most problematic.

LEGISLATING FOR CHANGE

Natural capital also appears to be part of a long-term strategy among environmental legislators and campaigners. This process has been underway for longer than you might think. The major environmental treaties of recent decades, such as the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 and the Paris Climate Treaty (ratified in 2016), incorporate the concept of natural capital. Article Six of the Paris Treaty calls for ‘environmental integrity, transparency, including in governance, and [parties] shall apply robust accounting’ – which means accounting in the literal, professional sense for environmental impacts. Legally binding measures set to emerge from Paris will make banks and other lenders consider the environmental impact of the operations they fund, from the building of dams to paper mills. For those lenders and companies keen to do their homework, there is also the Natural Capital Protocol, a non-binding 136-page framework that generates data for business managers to inform decisions.

Integration of natural capital into economic systems is likely to be driven by national and regional legislation. The EU already has laws to preserve this ‘capital’ in the form of the Water Framework Directive for fresh water, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive for the seas, the Air Quality Directive and the Habitats and Birds Directives which target wildlife and the space it needs to survive. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Office for National Statistics now publishes natural capital ecosystems accounts – earlier this year these valued the UK’s natural capital at around £761 billion.

Natural capital is already producing benefits in the UK, Williams argues, pointing to its deployment in the Solent (on the south coast of Britain) where it has quantified the benefits of clean water. ‘It used to be the case that if regulators said water quality had to be improved, the water company would respond that this would cost them money to implement. The government would then conclude this would affect growth. Now we’ve been able to show in quantifiable ways that improved water quality helps fishermen, helps the shellfish and benefits human health. That doesn’t affect growth negatively, it improves it.’

Tony Juniper of WWF points to catchment areas on Dartmoor, where water companies work with wildlife organisations to prevent peat entering the water course, thereby ensuring cleaner water arrives downstream requiring lower purification costs. ‘We’re already seeing companies joining the dots on this,’ he says.

Such a shift in mindset appears to underpin natural capital. ‘We’ve ended up in a situation where we use public money to pay water companies to clean up the muck that gets put in it,’ says Helm. ‘If we put a value on water, we change the way in which it is viewed.’

Further afield, the natural capital ethos has been practically applied. Belize has recently established the world’s first coastal management plan to feature a sustainable approach by quantifying and valuing coastal and ocean resources. The country’s coast includes spectacular atolls, lagoons, mangrove forests, seagrass beds, coral reefs and more than 1,000 cayes; it is also home to 35 per cent of the population and endangered species such as the West Indian manatee. The coastal plan reduces the area of habitat at high risk by 20 per cent, while also expanding economic opportunities, tripling the area for coastal development and tourism infrastructure, doubling that for marine aquaculture and holding steady the area for lobster fishing.

Yet Belize is a small country. Can natural capital approaches become embedded in the world’s major polluters? Guerry of the Natural Capital Project is optimistic and points to the fact that China has already zoned 49 per cent of its land into Ecosystem Function Conservation Areas (EFCAs). The intention is to use EFCAs to alleviate poverty while mitigating flooding, securing water supplies, renewing soil resources, reducing dust and sandstorms, and conserving biodiversity. ‘This has been spurred by the massive landslides and floods in 1998 that killed thousands and rendered 12 million homeless. They know if they pay attention to the kinds of approaches we are describing they may be able to develop sustainably without harming the very ecosystems that underpin healthy economies and healthy communities,’ says Guerry.

The True Cost of ClothingIn 2011, the clothing company Puma commissioned a specialist accountancy firm, True Cost Accounting, to audit its entire supply chain. Puma said the intention was to provide impetus for it and its suppliers to use more sustainable materials such as recycled polyester. The accounts showed that the direct ecological impact of its operations equated to £6.2m, but a further £74.7m fell within its entire supply chain. Meanwhile, the luxury goods company Kering began placing its audited environmental profit and loss account on an open-source platform in 2013. The account values Kering’s environmental footprint and that of its supply chains in monetary terms. It reveals that in 2017, the most significant impacts were generated in the supply chain (90 per cent), in particular from the production and processing of raw materials (76 per cent of the total). Leather was by far the biggest driver of impacts followed by wool, cashmere and metals such as brass.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND What does all this mean in practice for industries that use natural capital to meet our demand for goods and services? Rather than looking to the industry you might expect – the fossil fuels industry – advocates are focusing on sectors such as apparel, food and beverage, and finance that use both primary and secondary resources. The apparel industry has long operated on a business model of low-prices, low manufacturing wages, quick production and just as quick obsolescence, in turn creating further demand for manufacturing resources; it seems as far removed as any industry from sustainability. The NGO China Water Risk calculated that 40,000 litres of water can be required to grow 1kg of cotton, just 1kg of textiles produces 600 litres of wastewater and the average Chinese apparel factory discards 27.2 tonnes of usable, excess textiles every week. Greenpeace’s 2012 report on the impact of textile production in China found that hazardous waste included dye-related chlorinated anilines (which are toxic to a wide range of organisms and include known or suspected carcinogens) and perfluorooctanoic acid (a highly persistent and bioaccumulative toxic chemical).

The sector has responded with initiatives such as the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC) Group which provides supplier training, develops industry standards for chemical management information capture and monitors industry compliance. Then there is the HIGG index, a self-assessment standard for monitoring environmental and social sustainability through the supply chain, founded by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. However, it has also been accused of tokenism. ‘Unfortunately, natural capital is a concept that is vulnerable to being done badly,’ says Helm.

The public should not be excluded from scrutiny, argues Helm. The uncomfortable reality is that 96 per cent of the impact of a garment sits with the customer, far more than that derived from the factory or even the growing of the cotton. This is because the greatest footprint comes from the number of times we wash clothing along with our tendency to throw out wearable clothes.

A similar scenario emerges around timber, particularly hardwood. ‘Engaging with the timber industry will have little effect,’ says Helm. Instead he says we should look at where the demand for timber comes from. At the moment this is still primarily the United States and Europe. ‘We can either take the ivory approach and ban the import of mahogany,’ says Helm, ‘or you apply natural capital and put it in the accounts [of the nations who purchase it]. That will weaken demand for it.’

The food and drink sector faces similar challenges. The UNFAO has declared that livestock farming is a major driver of deforestation, and that the rearing of livestock for meat, eggs and milk generates 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The industry responds by arguing that reducing the sector’s emissions is complicated. ‘There is no prototype for a genetically modified ruminant that does not produce methane,’ asserts Dr Jonathan Scurlock, a senior climate advisor at the UK National Farmers’ Union. ‘You can minimise but you can’t abolish the emissions.’

By way of mitigation and preservation of the natural capital on which farming draws, the UNFAO and the International Meat Secretariat point out that the dairy sector has potential to utilise its role as a carbon sink, in the form of rangelands and grazing land, both significant sequesters of carbon.

Can you Code Biodiversity?In an attempt to make the concept of natural capital more tangible, WWF scientists have helped develop software tools that enable companies and governments to gauge and mitigate their impact on the resources they use. These include InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs), a free programme that models and maps the delivery, distribution and economic value of ecosystem services and biodiversity. This helps decision makers visualise the impacts of decisions and identify trade-offs between environmental, economic and social benefits. The InVEST software includes a generator for developing scenario maps that enable users to compare how ecosystem services are affected under different possible business plans.

WWF and its partners recently carried out a climate, ecosystem and economic assessment using InVEST in the Heart of Borneo, an area of mountainous forests with exceptional biological diversity. More than two decades of unsustainable logging, fires, plantation development and mining has led to a dramatic decline and degradation of forest and freshwater ecosystems. The assessment highlighted how conservation and sustainable land management could help create a green economy and contributed to the decision to designate the region as a Strategic National Area, the first such area in Indonesia.

DEALING WITH THE DEVIL

Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of putting a financial value on nature though. The concept of natural capital is seen by some as being a dangerous one, that by shoehorning nature into a narrow economic model you turn it into a tradeable commodity. Bram Büscher, a professor in the sociology of development and change group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, argues that natural capital reconceptualises nature from something intrinsically ‘good’ to a commodity that can be traded and substituted at will. ‘[Natural capital] is a dangerous illusion that masks the way capitalist growth undermines conservation,’ he writes in a blog on The Conversation. ‘Capital in a capitalist economy is never invested for the sake of it. The aim is to extract more money or value than had been invested. Otherwise it would not be capital.’

George Monbiot, the environmental writer and campaigner describes natural capital as ‘morally wrong’ and based on misconceptions. Attaching a price to an ecosystem, he suggests, is to effectively put it up for sale. Writing in The Guardian earlier this year, Monbiot described as ‘deluded’ the idea that we can ‘defend the living world through the mindset that is destroying it.’

Mutinational companies, who face the implications of incorporating natural capital into their everyday business are also looking hard at the issue, something which critics of natural capital argue proves their point. Unilever has issued a sustainable agricultural code which incorporates several elements of natural capital, including soil health, soil loss, nutrients, pest management and biodiversity.

Yet, while Unilever is widely seen as having a more enlightened approach towards its environmental impact than many other companies, it clearly considers te concept of natural capital to be in its infancy. ‘The world is in the early days of understanding and measuring natural capital in ways that can be systematically integrated into business decision-making,’ says a spokesperson for Unilever. ‘There are important questions about whether the valuation of natural capital will assist in the integration of natural capital decision-making, or whether it is preferable to understand the value of these resources independent of a monetary value being applied.’

Unsurprisingly, the NEF’s Williams disagrees with the critics. ‘There is a big difference between putting a price on something and valuing it,’ he says. ‘You can take a fish out of the sea, put it on a plate and put a price on it. But if you look at bees and their importance for pollinating the crops we eat, not for one moment is anyone going to suggest you buy up wild bees. There is no derivative market for bees.’

Tony Juniper, executive director for advocacy at WWF, is also sceptical of most criticism but cautions against seeing natural capital as a panacea: ‘It’s just one tool in the box, it has advantages and limitations. Not every element of nature has a clear and practical value and we need to recognise that.’

Natural capital supporters argue that it involves dealing with the real world and that it demands a pragmatic approach. The UK demand for new housing is a case in point, says Helm. ‘You can argue we shouldn’t build houses because they will impact on the environment – but try getting that one past the electorate.’ Far better, he suggests, to ensure these houses are built appropriately. ‘You don’t build on flood plains or on Sites of Special Scientific Interest, you just build where there is least damage. The economics of the cost of such locations to the builder and landowner – higher construction costs and lower house prices – should not be involved.’

(Mapping: Ben Hennig)

Ecological FootprintThis map is a visualisation of the average ecological footprint per person in each country of the world. According to the Global Footprint Network: ‘The ecological footprint per person is a nation’s total ecological footprint divided by the total population of the nation. To live within the means of our planet’s resources, the world’s ecological footprint would have to equal the available biocapacity per person on our planet, which is currently 1.7 global hectares. So, if a nation’s footprint per person is 6.8 global hectares, its citizens are demanding four times the resources and wastes that our planet can regenerate and absorb into the atmosphere.’

1 AugustThe day in 2018 when humans used up our annual supply of renewable resources and started spending down the Earth’s natural capital. Also known as ‘Overshoot Day’, it arrives earlier every year (in 2014 it fell on 20 August). The date is identified by calculating mankind’s ecological footprint, adding up all human competing demands for productive areas, including for food, timber, fibres, carbon sequestration and infrastructure. Carbon emissions make up 60 per cent of humanity’s ecological footprint.

SHARING THE LOAD

The reality is that natural capital is still in its infancy. ‘Things have moved on a little slower than I expected,’ says Guerry. ‘I would have hoped five years ago we would be further down the road than we are. Critics say that natural capital involves making deals with the devil, monetising nature and ignoring the importance of protected areas. We certainly need protected areas but we also have to pay attention to all the ecosystems of which we are a part.’ Greater public engagement with the concept would certainly help. ‘Most people don’t know or understand about natural capital. If they don’t know enough, they won’t change their behaviour. Will people hear that bees are worth so many billions of pounds to the global economy and immediately plant wild flowers in their garden? I doubt most will. At the level of individuals, it is more about looking at our own consumption, seeing our own local rivers being polluted and raising awareness of that.’

Juniper is optimistic that natural capital offers a persuasive case for action in the developing world. ‘This might change the discussion in parts of the world where it has been very difficult to get any serious attention paid to nature and the environment,’ he says. ‘Many countries are not in a position to listen when you tell them they can’t develop because it will harm the environment. Instead, it has more influence if you show how clean water and looking after the environment creates more development and food security.’

Can we, as the public, also take matters into our own hands? ‘Unlike climate change, you can do natural capital at every level,’ says Helm. ‘The beauty is we can all get on with it right now. This is something we can all start with in our back gardens, in ponds. Natural capital is a concept whose time has come. We have to push this as hard as we can.’

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The reason for the unusual location of Mount St Helens is becoming clearer

Of all the questions that swirl around the iconic Mount St Helens, which erupted so explosively in May 1980, one of the most curious is also deceptively simple: Why is the volcano situated where it is?

Located in the southwest of Washington state, the main Cascade arc of volcanoes (formed by the subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate beneath North America over the past 40 million years) is a fairly straight line featuring such peaks as Mount Adams, Mount Rainer and Goat Rocks. ‘St Helens, however, sits about 60km to the west, in a region where scientists don’t expect deep magma to surface,’ explains Paul Bedrosian, research geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey (USGS). ‘Not only is St Helens “out-of-line”, but it is also the most active volcano in the Cascades.’ The reason for this paradox has been historically unclear.

Now, by tracking seismic sound waves and magnetotelluric data (electrical conductivity beneath the surface), USGS and Oregon State University geophysicists have identified a vast underground rock formation – a ‘batholith’ – near the Cascadia arc, that obstructs the rise of magma. ‘Magma in the lower crust is spread out over a relatively wide area – within this broad zone there are places more or less favourable for it to ascend and ultimately erupt,’ says Bedrosian. ‘Below the batholith, where ascent is difficult, magma is deemed to “stall” in the crust. In contrast, where there exist crustal flaws, such as beneath Mount St Helens, magma can ascend more readily.’ Due to what he calls ‘an ancient tectonic scar’ below Mount St Helens, the volcano acts as a release valve on the pressure that builds up beneath the batholith.

Predicting future eruptions – which has generally depended on observations of the bulging dome and earthquake activity that preceded the 1980 event – could be more accurate now, as experts monitor the movement of magma below the surface.

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Most plants thicken their leaves in response to higher carbon levels in the atmosphere – a new climate change model reveals this could have a big impact on global warming

For many years, scientists have observed a curious phenomenon among plants – most species thicken their leaves when levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rise. This leafy weight-gain, which can see leaves fatten-up by as much as a third, has been observed in many species of plants, from woody trees to crops such as wheat and rice.

Two scientists from the University of Washingtonassessed the impact of this response on the climate. They took existing climate change models that use the high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels expected later this century, and found that when thicker leaves were added to the equation the amount of carbon in the atmosphere increased further. Their new model predicted an extra 5.8 petagrams (or 6.39 billion tons) of carbon in the atmosphere per year when leaf thickness was taken into account, levels not far off the amount of carbon released due to human-generated fossil fuel emissions (8 petagrams, or 8.8 billion tons).

Abigail Swann, assistant professor of atmospheric sciences and biology, who conducted the research with doctoral student Marlies Kovenock, explains that the results are due to the fact that plants with thicker leaves photosynthesise less and are therefore less effective as a carbon sink. This isn’t due to the individual leaves acting differently but rather a cumulative effect. ‘What we found is that if plants make their leaves thicker, those leaves cost more to the plant to build and so we found that plants built less leaf area in total. That meant that the photosynthesis rate at a global rate was lower.’ In short, fewer leaves = less photosynthesis = less carbon dioxide converted into oxygen = more carbon in the atmosphere.

Swann explains that they also looked at the temperature effect of these leaf changes. Their simulations indicated that global temperatures could rise an extra 0.3 to 1.4ºC beyond what has already been projected to occur by scientists studying climate change. ‘About half of that temperature effect came from the physical effects of the fact that there’s less leaf area,’ says Swann. ‘In places such as the Amazon where it’s quite hot, a lot of cooling of the land surface occurs due to evaporation of water through leaves (transpiration), and so with less leaf area there’s less cooling of the surface through that process.’

In forests such as the Amazon, less total leaf area means less cooling of the land surface

Swann wants to understand this process further. Less total leaf area doesn’t seem like a good competitive strategy for plants that have to compete for light, and so it’s not yet clear why they do it. Though there are some theories as to why plants thicken their leaves, there’s no decisive answer to the question and unlocking the mystery could reveal more about the global effect of the phenomenon.

For Swann the key thing to note is that this new model illustrates how many factors are at play in our climate system. She wants to see physiological changes to plants investigated further and plant traits, such as changing leaf mass, considered in climate projections. ‘Biology does have a pretty big impact on the climate we experience in the future and it’s one of the things we don’t understand very well,’ she says. ‘We need to understand the responses that plants have, and we need to know more about how plants work because there are global-scale implications.’

For now it seems likely that plants will continue to thicken-up given the continual rise in carbon dioxide levels, mostly caused by human industrial activity. In 2013, carbon dioxide levels surpassed 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in recorded history and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today hovers around 410 parts per million. Scientists predict that within a century, it may rise as high as 900ppm. When it comes to the implications of this on plants we’re only just starting to pay proper attention.

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Not just the preserve of flatulent cows, methane is causing problems on a much wider scale discovers Marco Magrini

Odourless, colourless and ruthless. In its structural simplicity (one carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms), methane can be a real pain in the neck. The gas is naturally generated by the fermentation of organic matter, such as pig manure, but also comes from sources as disparate as rice fields and cattle belch. As a greenhouse gas, it is at least 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that it has been responsible for 20 per cent of global warming since pre-industrial times.

In industrial times the worst emissions have taken place. Along with humanity’s excessive craving for pig and cow meat, the very fossil fuels that are responsible for carbon dioxide emissions have spewed out massive amounts of methane too. A string of recent studies has revealed that 2.3 per cent of natural gas escapes when used as fuel, nearly double the official estimates; that methane concentrations in the atmosphere have risen sharply in the last 20 years; and that nearly 70 per cent of annual methane emissions come from the fossil fuel sector.

Methane, the main component of natural gas (to which an offensive odour is added for security reasons), seeps out of gas wells, not to mention the miles of pipelines and municipal distribution lines. It escapes from oil operations too, where it is often burned-off on site – so-called ‘flaring’. ‘Roughly half of the methane the oil and gas industry is emitting could be cut at no cost,’ recently claimed Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency.

With an added cost, it could be restrained almost completely. In oil wells in which hydrogen sulphide is present – an odourless, colourless gas that is much more deadly, killing people as they inhale – the oil industry has developed zero leak technology. Why not use the same technology to prevent methane from flying away?

A group of the top oil and gas companies recently pledged to slash methane emissions by a fifth by 2025. Yet, the American administration has just started to relax regulations on the containment of methane leaks from fossil fuel operations. It is not just about Big Oil. It is about tens of thousands of oil and gas wells owned by private companies, often tiny, who pay little or no regard to the problems of letting methane escape.

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Barrett didn’t linger on how she had recently joined more than 300,000 people at the People’s Climate March in her home state of New York, or how she spoke at the signing of the historic Paris Agreement and became a fellow at the Alliance for Climate Education – all before her 18th birthday. Nor did she single out leaders and industries who ignore scientific facts for short-term ends. And she didn't dwell on her long-term involvement with 20 other young people in a landmark climate change litigation case.

‘We must ensure that we are not characterised or held prisoner by our mistakes of the past,’ she said calmly, ‘but that we are defined by our perseverance and bravery of the present.’

The 21 youth are suing the federal government on constitutional grounds over climate change. The non-profit Our Children’s Trust law firm of Eugene, Oregon is spearheading the ground breaking legal action (Image: Robin Loznak/Our Children’s Trust)

She may not have made it the focus of her speech, but Barrett's participation in a current legal case is significant. Twenty-one plaintiffs, aged between 11 and 22, were due to have their day in court on 29 October in a lawsuit called Juliana v US. They were to be accompanied by their pro bono lawyers from Our Children’s Trust (OCT) and an ex-NASA director, James Hansen, heralded as ‘the father of climate science’.

The case was originally filed in 2015 (against the Obama administration) at the US District Court for the District of Oregon. The plaintiffs argued that despite five decades of awareness by the US government, continued endorsement of a fossil fuel energy system compromised their constitutional right to ‘life, liberty, and property’.

The legal claims are as diverse and as creative as the plaintiffs themselves. During argument at the US Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit in December 2017, in which the government asked the court to dismiss the case, an 18-year-old Obama-prize-winning hip-hop artist of Aztec descent explained his experiences of increased drought, declining snowpack and flooding in Colorado. On the other side of court, government lawyer Eric Grant continued to dryly characterise the case as being of ‘clearly meritless character’. In the context of the impending climate emergency – detailed this October in the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC – the courtroom contrast was as shameful as it was cinematic. The Court of Appeal rejected the government's argument and set 29 October as the trial date.

Then, just 11 days before trial, US government defence lawyers submitted a third and final request for the case to be dismissed. Hurdling the jurisdiction of the Oregon District Court, the request was received and a temporary, administrative stay was granted by the Supreme Court to allow it time to consider the federal government’s petition. On 22 October the plaintiffs filed a response to this delay, requesting that the court allow their trial to proceed and pointing to numerous mischaracterisations of the lawsuit. As of yet, the case has not been heard, but it is not yet over. In Eugene, Oregon, and across the US, young people are now rallying outside dozens of courthouses calling for intergenerational justice on an urgent issue they didn’t create but are burdened to inherit.

Government lawyers do not dispute established climate science in this case, or that mankind is responsible for observed atmospheric changes. What the US government under the Trump administration continues to contest are the legal rights of the plaintiffs. OCT lawyer Julia Olson has built her case partly around the ‘public trust’ doctrine. With origins in Roman Law, the doctrine prevents the government of any country from taking actions that will deny the future well-being of its citizens. It applies to running water, the sea and – crucially – the air.

When district judge Ann Aiken ruled back in 2016 that the trial could go ahead, she stated: ‘I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.’ But her statement marked only the start of the battle. Defence lawyers last week argued at the Supreme Court that Judge Aiken’s statement is ‘entirely without basis in this nation’s history or tradition’. As federal lawyer Eric Grant told the judges: ‘This court has exceeded its prescribed jurisdiction, and… is on a collision course with the executive branch.’

Climate Change expert James Hansen speaks during a press briefing with 21 youth plaintiffs on the steps of the federal courthouse in Eugene (Image: Robin Loznak/Our Children’s Trust)

The greatest mistake the government seems to be making is to underestimate their young opponents. In their October request for dismissal they referred to the plaintiffs as ‘21 minor children’. That was incorrect when the case was filed back in 2015. It’s certainly incorrect now. More than half of the Juliana plaintiffs are now old enough to elect politicians that represent their values in the imminent mid-term elections. They represent diverse indigenous communities from the Tangle People Clan to the Yankton Sioux Nation. Their experiences of climate change range from increased ice storms and wildfires in Alaska, to rising sea levels and algae blooms in Florida. They have experience outside Washington D.C. and have conversed with the leaders of nations.

Young people in the US, and around the world, are increasingly unwilling to hedge their future on the received fossil-fuel wisdom of their elders. With the absence of vested interests, and with no distorting political lens with which to view the world, they have a unique vantage on a planet headed for mass loss of species, destruction of island nations, crop failures, disease, habituated natural disasters, mass migrations and potential war within their lifetimes. As well as pursuing justice through the courts, some are now taking direct action to challenge the climate deniers still in power. From August of this year, 15-year old Swedish student Greta Thunberg has been striking from school until Sweden aligns with the Paris Agreement on emission reductions. Her actions have sparked solidarity strikes across Australia from even younger activists.

For the Juliana plaintiffs it is crucial that youth-led climate litigation has worked before. In April 2018, 25 activists from across Colombia, aged between 7 and 25, successfully won a landmark climate lawsuit against their government. The ruling required the president and the ministries of environment and agriculture to develop an intergenerational pact for the life of the Colombian Amazon within four months. These executive agencies were tasked with reversing the trend of deforestation and reaching net zero emissions by 2020 to comply with existing commitments under the Paris Agreement.

The successful Colombian climate plaintiffs (Image: Dejusticia)

Both the Colombian and the Juliana case utilised the expert evidence of Dr James Hansen. In his advisory opinion to the Bogota court, the NASA scientist drew on his 2017 research Young People’s Burden in which he explains how ‘continued high fossil fuel emissions today place a burden on young people to undertake massive technological CO2 extraction if they are to limit climate change and its consequences’.

Colombian lawyers from the advocacy and social justice organisation Dejusticia used a powerful civil-rights legal tool called a Tutela. Once invoked, a judge must resolve the case within ten days. Gabriela Eslava, one of the lawyers, drew inspiration from the successfulUrgenda climate litigation case in the Netherlands as well as the progress of Juliana. She notes how the deliberately narrow filing of her lawsuit in Colombia avoided conflict and helped expedite proceedings.

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Photos courtesy of DeJusticia

‘We need global leadership to work towards our long-term existence,’ concluded Juliana plaintiff Vic Barratt when speaking at the UN General Assembly in 2016. International consensus, cooperation and leadership is the planetary-level requirement for addressing what Dr Hansen refers to as the ‘mortal threat’ of climate change.

On a national level, Juliana-type litigation could be a useful tool in strong-arming governments who are disengaged with the climate crisis. At the individual level, it needs a little imagination. The younger generations are showing they are capable of visualising climate breakdown and its consequences, not only for the duration of their lifetimes, but for unborn generations too.

As Barratt said at the UN: ‘I could stand up here and tell you a personal story about my life, and the effect climate change has had on me. But this isn’t a story about me. This is a story about all of us.’

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Of Britain's 15 national parks, the New Forest is probably the one most synonymous with images of Autumn. Home to some of the country's most extensive areas of broadleaf deciduous trees, as well as open heathland, wild ponies and five species of deer, this rural retreat is a favourite haunt…

Covering an area of 570 square kilometres, the New Forest is the country’s second smallest national park, but with more than 15 million annual visitors, it is one of the most popular, no doubt due to its proximity to Greater London – less than two hour’s drive away.

Despite its name, the New Forest is steeped in ancient history, colonised by the Anglo Saxons and later becoming the favoured hunting ground of the royals after the Norman Conquest of 1066. William the Conqueror displaced many of the forest settlers by razing around 30 hamlets and farmsteads to the ground in order to create his ‘new’ royal hunting ground.

The forest clearly meant a great deal to the first Norman king. It was the only forest – Novesta Foresta – described in great detail in the Domesday Book of 1086. Legend states that William’s act of evicting the forest parishioners cursed him, and the subsequent death of two of his sons in hunting accidents in the forest only added to the folklore. One of those sons was his successor, William II, also known as William Rufus. He was killed in August 1100 when an arrow, fired by one of his men at a stag, glanced off an oak. Today, the Rufus Stone marks the spot where he fell and remains one of the most photographed sites within the forest.

HAVEN FOR DEER

Today, the deer of the New Forest enjoy a less harried existence amongst the leafy glades, bracken and heath. In all, five of the UK’s six species of deer can be found here: the native roe and red deer, the spotted fallow deer (believed to have been introduced by the Normans in the 11th century), and two exotics – sika and muntjac – introduced from Asia in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries respectively.

With up to 2,000 individuals, fallow deer are the most common and easily spotted throughout the forest. For many photographers their familiar white spotted flanks and light tan coat also make them the most attractive. They are also the only deer in Britain with palmate antlers – so-called because of their hand-like spread with the points (spellers) extending like fingers from a palm.

Red deer are the largest to be found, but with fewer than 300 individuals they aren’t easy to spot, although the areas around Brockenhurst and Burley are favoured locations. If sika deer are your objective, the largest populations are known to roam near Beaulieu.

Even harder to find are Britain’s other native, the shy and skittish roe deer. Although plentiful in number, their smaller size and preference for hiding in dense, bracken-strewn woodland means they are rarely spotted in broad daylight. Like the tiny muntjac, the best chance of seeing one is when they emerge into the open at dusk to forage.

There are roughly 2,000 fallow deer living in the New Forest

STALKING AND RUTTING

Whichever species of deer you chance upon in the forest, a long telephoto or zoom lens is necessary to ensure your subject is large enough in the frame from a safe distance. Fallow deer are the most comfortable with humans, but even they will move away if you approach noisily or are too close. Try to approach downwind from the herd as this will keep your scent away.

Carrying a tripod while stalking is not an easy undertaking, and no matter how quickly you can set up, there is always the possibility of the deer moving from their position or taking flight. A monopod is less of a handful and provides extra stability, but many photographers still prefer to handhold their cameras for speed and convenience. If so, you must set a fast enough shutter speed to counteract lateral movements and vibrations resulting from handholding the camera. Activating the vibration reduction system (should the lens have it), will also improve the chances of sharply focused, shake-free images.

The autumn months present another issue for photographers stalking deer. This is the rutting season and October is the peak month. At this time of year, mature males (stags) are highly charged with testosterone, bellowing frequently and entangling their antlers in the undergrowth as they seek to round up harems of females (hinds). Deer are normally shy, but during the rut a large red deer stag can become a dangerous adversary, especially if you stand between him and his hinds.

TREES OF WAR

Although largely flat there is a variety of scenery beyond the wooded areas of native oak, beech and ash. Broad expanses of dry and wet heathland cover as much area within the national park as the woodlands and there are coastal shores and estuaries to explore where the southernmost boundaries of the national park reach Southampton Water and the Solent.

The New Forest was home to a greater range of native broadleaved trees during William the Conqueror’s time than can be found today. For centuries, the forest provided much of Britain’s need for wood during wartime, being a source of timber for Royal Navy ships, including many comprising Admiral Nelson’s fleet during the Napoleonic Wars. During the First World War, many native oaks were felled and replaced with fast growing conifer plantations to meet the demand for wood. This policy continued when the Forestry Commission was created in 1919 with the aim of creating a strategic reserve of timber in the event of another war. Since the 1980s this policy has been reversed by the gradual phasing out of conifer plantations within the forest.

Despite this chequered history, there is still much to see and enjoy for tree-lovers with plenty of 300-year-old oaks, including the feted Knightwood Oak, known as ‘the Queen of the Forest’ and a visitor attraction since Victorian times. This giant and the Adam Oak near Minstead are regarded as the two largest oaks in the forest. Another historic oak is the Eagle Oak, situated in the Knightwood Inclosure, which gained its name and notoriety in 1810 when a keeper shot England’s last sea eagle from its branches. A picturesque detour is the Rhinefield Ornamental Drive and its ‘tall trees trail’, which winds through some of the UK’s most spectacular redwoods.

A mature English oak in the South Oakley inclosure

LANDSCAPE COLOURS

From late summer when the pink and purple flowering heather on the heaths have reached their peak, the natural colours of the forest constantly change up to the first snows of winter. Falling leaves of ash, beech, oak, alder and other deciduous trees create a colourful carpet on the forest floor and shafts of sunlight scatter through the branches to backlight the thinning canopy.

A dry, still and cool day provides the ideal conditions for the landscape photographer, with soft angled light that illuminates early morning mist and casts long shadows to add contrast. Try wide-angle views of the scene when the morning sun clips the top of the tree-line to spill across the misty heath. Look out for backlit details such as dew-covered spiders’ webs, or focus with a 50mm standard lens on the veins of yellow and orange leaves yet to fall. At ground level, look at where the light falls on the masses of fallen leaves, toadstools and other fungi – these are perfect close-up studies for a macro lens.

Of course, such conditions can be experienced in most native British woodlands during the autumn months, but the New Forest has a special and ever-present attraction for the camera that few other locations can match – wild ponies. These small, shaggy and mischievous creatures roam freely throughout the forest and even turn up on main village roads. Approximately 5,000 ponies live in this corner of England and they have been an integral part of the New Forest landscape for over 2,000 years. Although living wild and free, the ponies are owned by New Forest Commoners, those residents who have ancestral rights to graze their ponies and cattle within the forest boundaries throughout the year.

These rights date back before the Norman conquests and also include rights to dig for clay, cut peat, gather wood for fuel and to turn out pigs between September and November to pannage for fallen acorns and beechnuts. Don’t be surprised if a pig or two wanders into your frame as you press the shutter button!

UNIQUE ECOSYSTEM

Centuries of constant grazing by ponies and cows, peat cutting and pig pannage have shaped the New Forest’s ecosystem, limiting growth of some plant species while allowing rarer plants to prosper, such as sundew, wild gladiolus and chamomile. Ground nesting birds such as the Dartford warbler, which are in decline elsewhere in Britain, also thrive on the open heaths. For the bird photographer, the New Forest is a haven for myriad species, including woodlark, pied wagtail, song thrush, nightjar, stonechat, curlew and wood warbler.

The abundance of small mammals within the forest, notably squirrels, rabbits and field mice, means the woods and heaths also support healthy populations of owls, buzzards, kites and other birds of prey. The great prize for any birdwatcher or photographer is the silent and stealthy hunter, the northern goshawk. Few people manage to see one, let alone take a photograph, but even a glimpse of this majestic bird gliding through the thick woods is an experience rarely forgotten.

This was published in the October 2018 edition of Geographical magazine

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The Treasury has announced that it is considering imposing a tax on the incineration of waste. The move would mark a fall in favour for a practice once considered a good alternative to landfill. Katie Burton visits an incinerator to explore the pros and cons of burning rubbish

In London, we burn a lot of rubbish – 53 per cent of it. That’s compared to 30 per cent of household waste that gets recycled (a fairly pitiful figure compared to the household recycling rate of 44.6 per cent for England as a whole), and 13 per cent that’s sent to landfill. The amount of rubbish being burned in the capital has almost doubled in the last decade, reaching nearly two million tonnes in 2017.

The rest of the country is burning more rubbish too. The UK sent 39 per cent of all waste collected by local authorities to incinerators in 2016/17. The increase is largely the result of a move away from landfill in response to the EU’s Landfill Directive, which led to a tax on the practice.

The Treasury has now announced that it is considering imposing a tax on the incineration of waste. If agreed, it will be included in the next budget statement due to take place on 29 October. The measure would represent a significant fall from grace for incineration, once considered a favourable alternative to landfill and a convenient way of producing energy. Indeed, the fact that almost 98 per cent of the waste we burn is converted into energy – a process called ‘energy from waste’ (EfW) - has always been incineration’s main selling point.

Lakeside Energy from Waste facility in west London

Just outside Heathrow Airport, in west London, a white spiralling chimney pierces the sky. A little closer, and a smell reminiscent of bins left languishing hints as to what goes on inside the building beneath. Lakeside Energy from Waste is one of the country’s largest facilities for converting rubbish into energy. Danny Coulston, director of operations, explains that the facility takes in 450,000 tonnes of waste from households and industry each year for use as fuel.

The process starts with the waste being burned at 1,000ºC in one of two boilers. As in any power plant, this heats water in the boilers’ tubes and vaporises it to generate steam. Massive silver pipes transfer the steam at very high pressure to a turbine (the pipes twist and turn through a series of rooms, each hotter than the last). The steam causes the blades of the turbine to spin, which in turn drives a generator. The resulting electricity is transferred to the power grid.

The key advantage of this process is that it avoids the deleterious consequences of landfill, such as toxic chemicals leaking into groundwater and the release of methane. At Lakeside, they can provide electricity to 55,000 homes every year. The ash produced by burning the waste is also converted into aggregates suitable for construction projects or road surfacing. Coulston is keen to emphasise that the plant isn’t just an incinerator. ‘I consider this to be a power station,’ he says. ‘The waste is fuel and we generate power from that waste. We provide base load to the grid and for me that’s quite important.’

Pipes carrying steam from the burning rubbish make their way to the generator at Lakeside EfW

He also points to the fact that the facility produces low emissions. Limits for incinerator emissions are set by the EU and Coulston points to a screen on which bright green figures reveal that they are currently producing dust at a level of just 0.6mg per cubic metre (the EU limit is 10mg). In general, gases from the boiler are cleaned before being released into the atmosphere.

Critics however, are vociferous in their opposition. In July, the UK Without Incineration Network (UKWIN) presented a report to the House of Lords that claimed incinerators have never been required to report particulate emissions in the detail necessary to truly assess their impact on human health. The organisation also points to the greenhouse gases emitted (the amount depends on the make-up of the waste burned, but UKWIN says that for every tonne of waste burned, more than one tonne of CO2 is typically released into the atmosphere). Most importantly of all, it argues that incineration discourages recycling. The contracts entered into between EfW companies and local authorities tend to be very long in duration (20 to 30 years). According to UKWIN, this locks the authority into sending waste to incineration, diverting material that should be recycled.

Shlomo Dowen, a director at UKWIN, says that most of what is described as ‘residual waste’ and then burned isn’t really residual. The contents of black bin bags aren’t sorted in the way that recycling collections are and so rubbish chucked in a regular bin will normally make its way swiftly to landfill or incineration, whatever it contains. Hard-to-recycle plastic rejected by recycling plants (such as black plastic food containers and film) meets the same fate. ‘It’s not that what is leftover that could have been recycled or composted has been taken out, it’s just what the local authority couldn’t be bothered to compost or recycle,’ says Dowen.

Hard-to-recycle plastic is picked out of recycling plants and often sent for incineration

He adds that data gathered by UKWIN about the waste that enters incinerators reveals that around 20 per cent is usually composed of plastic, much of which could be recycled. As plastic is made from petroleum it is essentially a fossil fuel that releases carbon when burned. There is also a large proportion of card that could be composted and food waste that could go to anaerobic digestion facilities. Dowen is calling for investment into better collections and recycling facilities to counter this.

At Lakeside, it’s hard to tell what the waste that arrives is composed of. The bunker it’s stored in is so deep, the general impression is of a vast pile of grey matter, though there’s certainly plenty of plastic bags peeping out. Coulston explains that it’s not the job of the facility to sort through waste, so anything that it receives will enter the boilers, recyclable or not.

The truth of this is revealed deeper inside the building. Coulston opens a hatch in an innocuous looking wall and is greeted by an apocalyptic scene – a bonfire on steroids. Flames glare orange as they twist up and away from the burning piles of rubbish. A few seconds next to the glass partition is enough to draw out a sweat.

Waste is burned at 1,000ºC at an energy from waste plant

When it comes to the wisdom of this process, Ian Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of Southampton, agrees with the assessment of UKWIN. As an advocate for a circular economy he views EfW as a process that permanently destroys materials, thereby prohibiting circularity. For him, ‘waste’ is the wrong word to use – the stuff we throw out should be called ‘resources’. ‘Sadly, what we seem to have done is built more incinerators in England in the last few years, which was the wrong decision,’ he says. ‘Once you build an incinerator it has to have a lifetime of 20 to 30 years. You have to feed the monster. We’re still going to be burning our resources in 2040 to 2050.’

Incinerators are common in some other European states, particularly Denmark, Germany and Sweden. In 2014, Germany converted almost 39 million tonnes of waste to energy, compared to around two million tonnes in the UK. While incineration allows these countries to divert waste away from landfill (less than one per cent of Sweden’s waste ends up in the ground) the practice has become so prevalent that they have run out of waste to burn. In the wake of rising recycling rates, Germany now imports waste from countries such as the UK to keep its incinerators well-fed.

Williams says we should look at what countries such as Germany are doing now as our guide, rather than their past activity. He says that the Germans and Scandinavians invested heavily in incineration 20 years ago but are now shifting their focus. ‘Their incinerators are coming to the end of their lives and they are not re-commissioning them. Instead, they are investing in high-end recycling and circular economy policies.’

Whether the UK will face the same over-capacity problems is subject to an ongoing debate. Companies that run incineration plants in the UK, including Suez UK, have argued that high tariffs, imposed as a result of Brexit, could prevent the UK exporting waste to the continent in the quantities we currently do. They say that we will need more incinerators as a result, rather than less.

Incinerators such as this one in Oberhausen, Germany are common in several European countries

Coulston adds that, according to market analysis, our ever-increasing population and continued immigration will mean that the volume of residual waste will stay the same over the next 20 years, even when recycling rates go up. In fact, the UK is already increasing EfW capacity. Viridor, one of Lakeside’s shareholders recently announced that it’s investing £1.2bn in new UK facilities.

Anti-incineration campaigners predict the opposite scenario. UKWIN, along with others such as environmental consultant Eunomia, predict incineration overcapacity in the next decade as recycling improves. According to the London Assembly’s environment committee, it comes down to whether the UK hits its recycling targets. Its analysis states that if the UK reaches the planned 65 per cent recycling rate, then existing EfW capacity should be enough to handle residual waste.

These arguments are key to the question of whether an incineration tax is a sensible measure. UKWIN is outspoken in its support of the tax, but other industry players disagree. The Environmental Services Association (ESA), a body that represents 85 per cent of the waste management sector, is against the tax and doesn’t agree that it will increase recycling rates. It argues that tax could be more effectively utilised if it targeted the companies that manufacture non-recyclable plastic, rather than those who dispose of it.

Libby Forest, a policy and parliamentary affairs officer at ESA says: ‘An incineration tax would have no effect on changing behaviour given that the real barrier to recycling is sustainable end markets not EfW. It would therefore be a purely fiscal measure that would help the Treasury replace declining landfill tax revenues. In doing so, it would hit local authority waste management budgets and therefore actually harm recycling endeavours and run counter to the government’s environmental objectives.’

Whoever turns out to be right, it’s clear that the government is reconsidering its incineration strategy. With the UK struggling to reach a 50 per cent recycling rate, let alone the target of 65 per cent by 2035 as set out in the EU Circular Economy Package, existing methods need a revamp. Whether incineration is the answer or the enemy remains to be seen.

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It is well known that major earthquakes are often followed by aftershocks, sometimes powerful ones. But it is generally understood that these shocks will occur in roughly the same region of the world as the initial quake.

New research reveals a remarkable addition: such shocks are often also observed on the opposite side of the planet. After analysing 44 years of seismic data – from 1973 to 2016 – and comparing it to usual baselines of earthquake frequency, researchers from Oregon State University (OSU) concluded that large earthquakes (of magnitude 6.5 and above) are inducing shocks on the other side of the world.

‘The test cases showed a clearly detectable increase over background rates,’ says Robert O’Malley, researcher in the College of Agricultural Sciences at OSU. ‘Earthquakes are part of a cycle of tectonic stress buildup and release. As fault zones near the end of this seismic cycle, tipping points may be reached and triggering can occur.’ Crucially, the higher the magnitude of the original earthquake, the more likely it is to trigger others. These secondary quakes would generally occur within 30 degrees of the antipodal point of the original epicentre (the point diametrically opposite it) up to three days after the initial event.

The researchers highlight numerous recent examples of this phenomenon in action, including multiple quakes across Asia in the aftermath of the 2010 Chilean earthquake, and high seismic activity on the San Andreas Fault that they have linked to the 2011 Japanese earthquake. These were all apparently triggered by S-waves from the initial quakes thousands of miles away. ‘The understanding of the mechanics of how one earthquake could initiate another while being widely separated in distance and time is still largely speculative,’ explains O’Malley. ‘But irrespective of the specific mechanics involved, evidence shows that triggering does take place, followed by a period of quiescence and recharge.’

This was published in the October 2018 edition of Geographical magazine

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Marco Magrini finds that a warming world also means a more unhealthy one, not just for the planet itself, but for those of us living on it

What’s bad for the planet is usually bad for human health. In other words, the current warming trends don’t spell good news for the well-being of our species... or for many others.

There are exceptions. Insects will thrive as the warmer temperatures increase their metabolic and reproductive rates, as well as their appetite. Not only will this encourage the spread of Zika, West Nile and Chikungunya viruses carried by mosquitoes, but also tick-borne Lyme disease which is already on the rise. According to a paper recently published in Science, insects in the future are expected to devour a much higher percentage of crops than they do at present - around five to 20 per cent.

Richer countries, long thought to be more resilient to climate change, have discovered this summer that they are not. In Japan, a heatwave killed dozens of people and hospitalised 22,000. Forests were burning in Sweden and an African record temperature was registered in Algeria at 51.3oC. In Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, the air was unbreathable for days as the three cities, which usually benefit from the pristine forests that surround them, were engulfed in smoke from British Columbia wildfires.

Air quality was even worse in Mumbai, Jakarta and Beijing, where coal combustion dims the light, clogs the lungs and further warms the atmosphere. According to the World Health Organization, humans’ dependency on fossil fuels leads to seven million people dying prematurely every year because of high pollution levels.

Unchecked tourism is potentially reducing the number of cheetah cubs that survive to adulthood

While protected areas are generally designed to be safe havens, unchecked human pressures can have a negative impact,’ says zoologist Femke Broekhuis, lead author of a new study by the University of Oxford that has raised questions about levels of tourism in protected areas.

The study focused on female cheetahs and their litters in the Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. Cheetahs have litters of one to six cubs, few of which make it to adulthood. The study claims that the predator's already low cub survival rate is made even worse by tourist pressure. It found that one or no cubs survived to adulthood in tourist-prone areas, while an average of two cubs survived in areas with low levels of tourism.

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The higher mortality rate is likely to be caused by poor food supplies for the cubs. ‘Cheetahs, especially those with cubs, are a major tourist attraction and commonly attract large numbers of vehicles,’ says Broekhuis. ‘High tourist numbers have been found to negatively impact cheetah hunts, and even if a hunt is successful, the presence of tourists can result in a cheetah abandoning its kill.’

Cheetah numbers are already being squeezed. Predation from lions and hyenas as well as habitat reduction means the big cats have experienced drastic population decline. In fact, their numbers are thought to have halved in Kenya in the past 40 years to around 7,000 individuals. They have also disappeared from 91 per cent of their historic range.

While Broekhuis is eager to stress the positive role of conservation, she also admits the results are ‘worrying’ and suggests a number of changes in the conservation parks – such as stricter limits on the number of cars allowed near the animals, and bans on approaching known cheetah lairs. ‘Growth rates for cheetahs inside the protected areas need to be high if they are to compensate for declines outside of them,’ she concludes.

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